It seems that ever since a certain former European league MVP stormed into the Blazer team this past year, that we've been constantly bombarded with comparisons to another former European league MVP who plays for the San Antonio Spurs.  These comparisons drive me insane, because, aside from being white SGs who played in Europe, there is almost no similarity to either their games, or their situations.  In hopes of lessening the onslaught of these comparisons, I thought I'd take a second to punch holes in some of the most common axioms in this debate.

First off, though, I want to explicitly say that I don't mean to argue that Manu or Rudy are better than the other, just that they are two completely different players in two completely different situations.  Saying they're very similar or in similar siutations would be no different than saying that Reggie Miller and Clyde Drexler were very similar players.

Continue reading this post »

Well, after 1200 comments or so in the last two trade drawers, largely dominated by discussions of a certain Grizzlies point guard, I thought we should mix it up a little bit.  For everyone dying for more Conley-Bayless debate, I suggest going here, but let's try and limit this to non-Conley related topics for this post, at least.

Continue reading this post »

I might need a little leeway here, because I'm a little buzzed in my attempt to drown my sorrows away from this last Blazer loss.  I've been thinking this ever since about the second quarter of the game, though, so bear with me, and hopefully the spelling will be tolerable.

Continue reading this post »

After reading through a fanpost about the Blazers road record against the top west team being roughly equally as bad as every other team at the top of the west, I thought I'd investigate it further.  For me, the problem hasn't seemed to be that we've just been losing, but that we've been getting regularly blown out early in non-competitive games, as opposed to keeping it close throughout, which I'd assume the other "vet" teams have done.  Along those lines, using the game flows at popcornmachine.net, I decided to waste an hour going through each western conference team's road games and look at the max lead, max deficit, and final point differential, to get an idea of whether we've been more or competitive than other team's on the road.  Here's the data, with some snap analysis.  Enjoy.

Continue reading this post »