Token Weekly Blazers Post: Road Trip Edition

The Blazers began a 5-game road trip on Monday, which resulted in a 3-1 week with the finale coming on Tuesday against Golden State. Much has been made of the Blazers tough schedule to begin the season (11 of the first 18 games against playoff teams, many road games), but so far they have weathered the storm and held up quite well. The two wins in Florida early in the week were impressive, but after a tough loss at New Orleans Friday night, Portland was able to battle through a really ugly game against Minnesota and come up victorious in the end.


Mostly, everyone seems to be buzzing about Greg Oden. I think it's a pretty strange mentality to be surprised and encouraged by the play of a number one overall draft pick who is still working his way into the lineup, but I am getting used to him and think that he's looked good in some things that he's doing. Give him a couple of months, or even the rest of this season, and then we should know what we are dealing with here. This week is another 4-game week, with three on the road. It would be nice to have to post another 3 cards here on the blog (1 gets posted for each win, plus a bonus if I feel like it.)

About the cards:

• The Walton card was showing on the back of plastic case of 50 Blazers cards that I bought. Along with the 2008-09 Brandon Roy card, this was the only recent issue in the stack, coming from a 2007-08 50th Anniversary (insert?) set. I don't really buy basketball cards anymore (though if you have some Blazers you want to send my way, feel free!) so I'm not entirely sure what it came from.
  
• Terry Porter is now the Phoenix Suns head coach, a team that has been a circus so far this season. Shaq got ejected tonight for a Flagrant Foul 2 (I could see that being a movie name) and he seemed to get into it a bit with Porter while everyone was trying to get him to leave the court. Fleer was the gold standard in basketball cards in the late 80's, but this Porter card came from a set where they never figured out how to turn off the printers. They are probably still running to this day. I have that entire set, plus an blister packed Blazers team set, plus most likely another team set or two's worth of Blazers cards, so if you were seriously thinking of sending me some Blazers cards in a future trade you might want to cross that set off your list (not that I mind doubles that much.)
• James "Hollywood" Robinson is shown on his 1993-94 Upper Deck rookie card, and I think he did something idiotic in his Blazers tenure, but I don't recall what it was. All I remember is that he liked to jack up 3's like nuts, he had some pretty crazy hair, and he was part of the trade that brought J.R. Rider to Portland.

Bonus: This is the ticket stub from my first Blazers game. It was incredibly difficult to get tickets at the time, and the Memorial Coliseum only held 12,000+ people. Now, even when games are "sold out" you can safely walk up to the arena and get a ticket without much worry. Back in the day, a sellout really was a sellout, and you had to know somebody to get one of these. The Blazers had just had a 20-1 streak to begin the 1990-91 season snapped the night before, and barely hung on to beat Dallas. The most memorable part of the night, however, was getting to see Alex English score his 25,000th point in what ended up being his final season.