Portland Trail Blazers Preview: "The Martha McKeen"

In an effort to gear up for the NBA season (even though the season started last week), we will view the upcoming season through the eyes of Edward Hopper. Feel free to add your thoughts on the 2010 Blazers in our comments section.With a divine wind, this boat slices through water, making waves appear like loaves of bread. The sunlight crowns the waves in butter. That's on a good day when partaking of the ocean is like communion and eternal salvation. On any other day with a less than perfect wind, attempts at sailing around the sandbar can be as futile as a kamikaze mission. Today the wind is heaven sent, and if Commodore Roy were less hungover, then today would be the day that the little boat that could sailed out past the breakers and out of sight from the coast, like a dove sent from the beach into the great blue yonder.

But Commodore Roy is hungover, singing W. B. Yeats poems to the tune of Modest Mouse songs, banging his peg leg onto the hollow drum of the deck and playing slap bass on his thigh with the palm of his hand, and, unfortunately, he's yet to realize the anchor of the S.S. Oden still drags the bottom of the ocean's floor from where it was dropped the night before.

The heavy chain pulls at the beams of the boat's hull. Commodore Roy believes the creaking is the sound his skull makes after a night of too many bourbons. Nails are pried loose from wood, and, below the deck, water gathers like lead in the belly of a whale; it's gut is about to burst. The bleeding is internal, caused by an anchor no one can see. Sea gulls glide through sun rays on what appears to be the consummate sea breeze, but the journey of the S.S. Oden appears to be much shorter than her crew intended.

Dunk of the week: Cheikh Samb, meet Mr. Roy

So your an NBA player; you get paid well and you get to travel the country playing the game you love. But you only average 6 minutes a game and you have only played in 9 so far. Your two biggest dreams after making it to the league and lasting longer than a season, are to win the Finals and to get your own poster. Playing for the Clippers, you understand the Finals are an impossibility. But what about a poster? With that amount of playing time the probability of ending up on your own poster are to put it mildly, bleak. Yet in the clip below, Samb finds away around these statistical barriers by borrowing a trick from Greg Ostertag's book: If your not going to get your own poster, get on someone else's.

The number of the day is:

(Click the photo to enlarge)

52, as in Brandon Roy dropped fifty-two points in a 124-119 victory over the Phoenix Suns. Roy was 14-of-27 from the floor and 19-of-21 at the line. He bested his career high of 38 and ended up two short of the franchise record of 54 set by Damon Stoudamire. Roy has been lighting the scoreboard up averaging 36.4 points in his last five games, and was showered with chants of MVP from the Portland crowd. His offensive assault on the Suns included a tiebreaking 3-pointer with 1:01 left that helped the Blazers go on a seven-point run to end and win the game.

If he can manage to play at this high of a level, the Blazers will have to be looked at as a contender in the west and those chants of MVP will have to be taken seriously.

Time Waster: While you were sleeping

The one bad thing about living on the east coast is having commitments that don't grant us the ability to stay up until 2 a.m. to watch the end of west coast NBA games. So for those of you that reside to the right of the Mississippi with sleep schedules and priorities, here is the video from the best finish the NBA has seen since Derek Fisher stunned the Spurs with .04 seconds on the clock. This one comes via the Blazers and Rockets, where they supplied us with a three lead changes in the last 1.9 seconds of over-time.



I think I could watch this clip about 20 times before I got tired of it.

Awful Announcing: Brandon Roy Is A Golden God