J.A. Adande, ESPN.com: As wobbly as Roy's knees are, he showed he still has something left with that 18-point fourth quarter in Game 4 of the Dallas series. That's as many points as Bargnani has ever scored in a playoff game. Give me a guy who can take over in the postseason.

Figure someone may find this useful

Last year's record? 50-32, lost in the first round to the Utah Jazz.

Significant departures? Travis Outlaw(notes), Martell Webster(notes), Jerryd Bayless(notes), Juwan Howard's(notes) furrowed brow.

Significant arrivals? Luke Babbitt(notes) y'all, Armon Johnson(notes), Wes Matthews, Fab Oberto.

Apparently Kelly Dwyer didn't watch the playoffs...

Love some Nic news

"I feel fit, I'm confident in my foot again and I feel like my conditioning is good so hopefully I'm not too far away, I've just got to put in the hard yards and wait for the call."

Mind you, this is a completely automated projection system -- no human bias was introduced at any point... SPM was developed through a regression on adjusted plus/minus, I used the method described here to project SPM in 2010, last year's average rookie values of -1.56 SPM and 989 minutes were plugged for all 2010 rookies, a regression equation was used to project minutes played (MP_Y = 398.1 + 0.637*MP_Y-1 + 0.102*MP_Y-2 - 0.023*MP_Y-3), wins were calculated by (W = 40.9 + 2.68*EffDiff), and ESPN's depth charts were used for current rosters.

Perfect.

We may be mired in the dog days of summer here stateside, but across the pond a few Blazers are playing for their respective countries in preparation for the European championship, EuroBasket 2009.

LAS VEGAS -- The reviews around the league for the Trail Blazers' acquisition of Andre Miller are generally positive.

"It's going to help them out a lot," Oklahoma City Thunder forward Kevin Durant said. "He and Brandon Roy in the backcourt together? I was just telling my brother the other day, 'That's going to be a monster.'"

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A couple of leftover thoughts about the Trail Blazers' signing of free agent Andre Miller ...

Making McMillan happy

As everybody knows, Andre Miller was not the Blazers first choice in the free agent market. But from Day 1 of the offseason, he was the No. 1 choice of coach Nate McMillan.