There were red flags the Blazers ignored. Taking Durant would have been the right move. Instead they drafted Benjamin Button.
Just his legs. Odens knees. RIP. Moses Malone did pass almost a decade ago. He was only like 60 too, sad.
I remember thinking at the time, before the draft, that we might be picking Bowie over Jordan all over again.... And we did.
I always thought they should have drafted Charles Barkley.. I have no problem with them passing on MJ, they had Clyde, and back then, the NBA actually had "positions", so it made sense to me. Besides, they had Mychal Thompson, who even though undersized at center, people forget how good Mychal was.
Oden and Bowie were "bad" because they were injured, not because they were actually bad. I can certainly see a healthy Bowie being an important part of a championship team with the Trail Blazers, and I am not going to fault management if they thought Bowie was a more likely path to a championship than Jordan.
CP3 was drafted ahead of us at four in 2005. We drafted stalwart Martell Webster at six. We did miss out on Ray Felton who was picked five by the bobcats. But we eventually land that legend.
That's right, I forgot that my bad. It was lurking in my subconscious that we some way had a chance to get Paul.
Yeah, sure... but we owned the #3 pick originally before trading back with Utah, who selected Deron "Is Deron" Williams. I mean, after all... we DID have Sebastian Telfair, at the time, so Genius G.M. John Nash figured we were set at the PG spot for the foreseeable future. Oof...
What red flags did the Blazers ignore? There were many positives or negatives, risks and rewards for both players. Taking Durant would've been against the consensus at the time, Oden was the clearly superior prospect. Sure we know now in hindsight Durant was the better move. Plenty of decisions to fault the Blazers on such as passing on CP3 because of Telfair. I don't see the logic in faulting them on taking the superior prospect.
