Hi there,

First of let me say this is a great site I was pretty happy to find an educated blog site where fans can openly share their opinion. Also I’m not a negative Nancy or some new booty to the site or a troll. I’m simply a realist who knows that basketball players, coaches and GMs are all just human beings like the rest of us except with way more money.

You might have seen me around the site I've been here for awhile but mostly in the back ground speaking up every once in a while. Over the last 6 months if there’s one thing I've learned about this website it’s the fans here have a tendency to expect a great miracle every time the blazers are in the news. During the season our young team shocked the NBA and even some of us by overachieving and showing the league that Portland is not ready to be tossed into the lower echelons of teams with Minnesota, Oklahoma and Memphis. KP showed the league that careful scouting and timely wheeling and dealing in the NBA draft can net you a young and talented team ready to compete, but I think all these things have gone to our fan bases head.

During the draft and in the month and weeks leading up I sat back and read probably hundreds of post about the great things KP would do to net us Rubio a top 5 talent with our lowly 24th pick draft Dejuan Blair and Nate would turn him into the poor man’s Malone, trade half the roster for CP3, Rondo, D Harris. There is something we are all forgetting KP is Kevin Pritchard a simple guy from Bloomington Indiana he isn’t the Moses of the Blazers he’s been on the job for 3 years now guys not every move he makes will be a block buster move. Sure we can call the 2007 draft a brilliant move but let’s be honest some teams dropped the ball with poor scouting and poor decisions. I think KP was hindered at this year’s trade deadline because of the “Pritchslap” (I’m not trading with a guy who “Pritchslaps” people are you?) because every move he made had to be a blockbuster in the eyes of the Blazer Nation he’s going to do thing we don’t expect… why ? Because he has access to WAY more information than we have and sometimes it’s more information than other teams have and that’s when we as Blazer Nation end up winning big in the off season. KP can never live up to the draft of 2007 it was a once in a life time thing people it was his day the stars aligned and things fell his way a pure stroke of genius and luck let’s not expect it every off season.

The 2008-2009 Blazers are a great team they did an amazing job given the injuries and multiple trade rumors around the team. They kept their head level and went out and competed every night and left it all out on the floor for the world to see, we took a lot of teams by surprise. I always envisioned after a big upset win the opposing coach tearing into his coaching staff for failing to properly scout Outlaw, Batum, or Rudy, it’s not going to happen again this season the NBA is on notice the Blazers are here they are young they are hungry and they are GOOD. We are not going to sneak up on the NBA again this season like Chris Paul and the Hornets did in 2007-2008 (compare the 07-08 Hornets to 08-09 Hornets same team way less success). No matter what moves we make this off season no matter how big next season depends on ONE thing D-E-V-E-L-O-P-M-E-N-T for Oden, Bayless (how quickly we went from singing his praises after the NJ dunk to calling for him to be traded), Batum and Rudy. This group of players can compete for a championship… but it’s not going to be next season like we all think it’s still 2 or 3 more years away. In all reality we aren’t going to have the same success and results we had last season the NBA is going to be ready for us there’s going to be Brandon Roy defenses they're going to exploit our weaknesses. I would love that but deep down we all know that we won’t that’s why we call for trading our scrap players for an NBA all star an seriously expect it to work. This is a great team of good players young players let’s just give them the chance to do what they love to do and what we love to see them do PLAY BASKETBALL. Remove all of the 2010 championship expectations and calling for the roster to be blown up because we came across a team with 2 of the best defenders in the NBA ( a team that doesn’t exist anymore by the way) I would love to see this same team return and see the results we get next season I would also Love to see Gerald Wallace on this team but I don’t expect to wake up every morning to the news that KP “Pritchslapped” Michael Jordan and traded 2 loafs of wonder bread to the Bobcats for Wallace.

That ends my ranting and raving for the next 6 months.