Blazer's Edge has a nice transcript of Terry Stotts' recent interview for Trail Blazers Courtside. Some interesting points he makes:
He in general praises the Spurs victory and the coaching staff of San Antonio. He thinks it is good for young people to see a different, creative kind of basketball. After that, though, he comments upon what this means for Blazer fans looking back on the Spurs-Blazers series. He says that the Blazers obviously didn't do well, but nevertheless, there is something to take away:
Bottom line we lost 4-1, Miami lost 4-1.
This is quite the parallel. Is Stotts saying the Blazers are as good a team as Miami? Not necessarily: he's merely saying they performed as well. But it wouldn't be a baseless claim, if he were to have made it. Much was made of Miami having to put up with the best of the NBA the whole season--despite their being in the weak Eastern Conference, they were champions and so faced every team's A-game--so the fact that, in a much, much tougher Western Conference, the Blazers nearly tied their record throughout the season, was heavily downplayed. But, now we know better, and may well realize that this assessment of the Blazers was a mistake. Throughout the year, the Heat convinced analysts, as I noted in another post, that their problems were due to their merely not kicking in their "other gear." The playoffs, and the Finals in particular, showed it had to do with some systemic problems in their roster, as well as general fatigue. The fact that the Blazers put up a similar number of wins in arguably the toughest Western Conference in memory, and ended up losing to the Spurs in a similar fashion, may provide, in the end, a pretty good indicator of just how good this Blazers team may be: they may well be playing the same, if not better (given the difficulty of the Conference, which may trump the fatigue of Miami as an obstacle in winning), as the Heat.
Joel Freeland beat [Meyers Leonard] out. It was much more about what Joel did do than what Meyers didn't do.
This is also interesting: Meyers Leonard has never gotten quite a fair shake from fans. Minutes in games in general are overvalued in terms of judging how much a player contributes to the team's overall success, since players contribute in practice just as much as they do in games. So the general disappointment in his not playing well enough to earn more minutes, seems a bit overdone. Stotts, here, changes the narrative somewhat, though: it emphasizes just how much Joel did contribute to the team and what happens when one player is simply more useful for the on-court success than another.
In all fairness, we had a very young team. We had eight players in their first and second year.
This was an interesting comment, given that there is much talk about the Blazers (Matt Moore is a proponent of this view, and not without reason) actually being old. Batum, Matthews, Aldridge--these crucial members of the team aren't exactly young. But it is clear Stotts views the team itself and its makeup differently, not just focusing on the starters. This I think was the most surprising piece of the whole interview: so much focus is given on the age of the starters, it isn't realized just how young and flexible these players on the Blazers generally are. Coming into next year, with the experience of one or two years behind them, the Blazers might be a much more educated team.
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The next and last bit of Blazer news for today: if you are going World Cup crazy, look no further than this podcast of ESPN FC and Grantland's hilarious (and super-informative) "Men in Blazers" with our favorite Frenchman Nicolas Batum. It's from not too long ago.
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