I couldn't be happier for Portland and Seattle today. I lived in the Pacific Northwest for six glorious years -- back when it was The Glove vs. The Jail Blazers, two of the top teams in the West. Needless to say, I'd become deeply disturbed by what had happened to the basketball scene in the Northwest since I departed, and I'm hopeful today is the beginning of the renaissance.
Maybe winning the draft lottery will get the Blazers back in the good graces of their community, which in better days was among the league's most rabid fan bases. And maybe the No. 2 pick will convince the civic leaders in Seattle to keep the Sonics where they belong and replace KeyArena with something less anachronistic. For crying out loud, winter there is depressing enough already -- can you imagine slogging through it while having no pro sports from January to April?
Besides, now the Sonics
have to stay. This is too perfect. Oden vs. Durant. Portland vs. Seattle. You can't make a more natural rivalry than this. Just a three-hour drive apart, the clubs have amazingly similar histories -- expansion teams in the late '60s, titles in the late '70s, a renaissance in the late '90s that fell just short of the promised land, and a depressing rebuilding effort in the current decade. They've shared Nate McMillan, Bob Whitsitt and Lenny Wilkens, among others, and they have two of the league's better fan bases ... at least before the teams started going out of their way to alienate them.
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John Hollinger
