Through a dismal Blazer season, Brooks says he still loves it here
For nearly three decades, Scott Brooks made visits to Portland to play against the Trail Blazers — for the first 10 years as a player, then another 18 as a coach.
Larry Brown looks out front window, lands on Memphis Tigers’ bench
Larry Brown is more than a basketball lifer.
I’m no fan of no fans at Moda, and neither is Damian Lillard
Having left the newspaper business in April after 45 years, I’d not been to a Trail Blazer game at Moda Center until Sunday’s date with the New York Knicks.
Portland PR honchos Jim Taylor and Jake Gifford were good enough to credential me and allow me to experience first-hand what it’s like to be in an NBA arena without fans due to COVID-19.
On the Trail Blazers’ lousy start, Hassan Whiteside and my former boss, Alabama’s long snapper, a Texas grad assistant and all those $$ tossed around in college football
Things on my mind as we kick off a new (and hopefully far better) year …
• A statistical analysis of the Trail Blazers’ disappointing seven-game start to the 2020-21 campaign portends that the local NBA quintet is fortunate to be 3-4.
The off-season emphasis by general manager Neil Olshey was help at the defensive end, something that was a near-constant during Terry Stotts’ first eight years as coach.
Something new: A weekly menu of sports book reviews
As a service to our readers — the ones who enjoy sports books — we’ll critique an offering a week from now until Christmas.
The first one is a book written by one of my favorite writers and a great guy familiar to sports fans in this area. Bud Withers worked for a long time for the Seattle Times and P-I, but before that was with the Register-Guard in Eugene, where he came across one of the most polarizing figures ever to hit the Northwest college basketball scene.
Fifty years ago, the Blazers got it all started with a victory over the Cavs …
Friday marks the 50th anniversary of the first regular-season game ever played by the Trail Blazers.
It was also the first professional game for rookie guard Geoff Petrie, one of the best players in franchise history and later the club’s general manager. And it was the first NBA game called by Bill Schonely, who was to become a legend and perhaps the most popular figure ever with the Blazers.
The date was Oct. 16, 1970. Portland beat fellow expansion club Cleveland 115-112 before a crowd of 4,723 at Memorial Coliseum.
You Can Bet On It
I was mildly surprised Michael Jordan allowed the subject of his gambling to be included in “The Last Dance.” My guess is that he took it as another opportunity to convince the public that he did nothing wrong, that he was only guilty of being a “compulsive competitor,” not a “compulsive gambler.”