Welp, that was a bummer.
I speak of course about the USA loss draw yesterday, which got many a
Trail Blazer himself excited for the World Cup.
I hate to see Wes Matthews dressed to the nines as he was and to think
of him disappointed as we all are after being so close to a smooth ride to the
next round. But then again, if anyone welcomes
the bumps on the road, it’s the Iron Man, who is rumored to have been quite
good at soccer himself when he was younger.
Also, I think that stomach can take the punch in the gut it delivered to
all of us. Nic Batum also seemed, from
various tweets, to be following the game closely. He has, however, his France to root for as a
form of consolation, so I don’t pity him too much.
Terry Stotts too was apparently
watching. He made some interesting comparisons
between the two sports in an interview not too long ago on Trail Blazers Courtside. Following the very astute comment of Antonio
Harvey that commented upon how, “when you take the ball up the sideline, it
forces the defense to flatten out and opens up shots along the perimeter, which
is what you want in soccer,” he added:
The other thing they do is they utilize the corners. Basketball
in the NBA is really starting to realize, you see a lot of teams dibble down to
the corner, pass it up. San Antonio is a great example of that, where they’ll
bring it down and the guy catching, if he doesn’t have something he’ll dribble
it down to the corner, swing it and play that way.
Another little bit of a window into Stotts' capacious basketball noggin.
In other Blazer news, many of the bench are in
town again after a short break at the end of the season to do workouts. There are pictures of Thomas Robinson, C.J.
McCollum, Will Barton, Joel Freeland, Alan Crabbe, and Meyers Leonard all grinding
away in the Blazers’ practice facility--it wouldn't surprise me if Wes Matthews is there too. I'll be giving my take on what they each might be working on in the coming days.
Also, today Mo Williams officially used the option on his contract, which may allow him to sign a very good deal with another team or again with the Blazers. There has been much
speculation about him and his future. Most
who follow the team closely seem to think the Blazers will give him another
contract he’ll keep, because of how well he works with this team and how well
he runs the court. But there are other,
slightly younger backup pointguards and two guards who play good defense (and
perhaps better defense than Williams), like the Clippers’ Darren Collison, so
things aren’t set in stone just yet. And
the market is ripe for the type of player Williams is: while the market is
flooded with point guards, many are too young and still only show promise (Norris
Cole, say) and not experienced and able to work in a variety of offenses as
well as Mo is. Plus Mo can hit that
three ball. These are solid reasons the
Blazers might keep him, however: with the general plan for next year to be to
run just as an effective an offense while getting better on defense, it wouldn’t
quite make sense for the Blazers to remove a player who was a key component of
their offensive success. We’ll see what
happens.
Finally, there was a brief bit of entertaining postseason fallout
from the playoff series between the Rockets and the Blazers too recently. Specifically, it was a Twitter war. Shots were fired by the social media crew of
the Rockets, as they tried to win the NBA Social Media awards by listing
various reasons the Rockets deserved to win.
The tenth reason was simply that the Blazers were in competition against
them, and they claimed any vengeance against the Blazers would be nice. The Blazers staff did not descend to such
slave morality ressentiment, and simply noted that they were a little too busy
to worry about such petty reasons, as they were playing in the second round of
the playoffs for quite a while. The
Rockets crew responded with a pretty pathetic “How’d that go?” The whole
debacle was pretty ineffective for the Rockets, in the end, and rather curious
and strange on their part: the “how’d that go?” is a gesture which never works
because it implies getting to a higher round and not winning a championship is
somehow more of a failure than getting blasted out of the first, and listing
reasons they “should” (which I'm sure many read as "deserve") to win the Social Media award in the first
place only adds to the image problem of them being a rather snotty entitled franchise—one
would think the less they came off that way, the better for their fans. For the record, Damian Lillard ended up winning
Social MVP, so again, it seems, he spoils the Rockets’ hopes.
Apparently, he is even virtually clutch.
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