My Favorite Blazers: Johnny Davis, Rick Carlisle, Dick Harter
It has been long enough ago — three decades, in fact — that many of you may not be familiar with the era that bridged the Clyde Drexler/Rick Adelman era with the Jail Blazers.
On Dan Hurley, Lillard and the number zero, tanking, Aldridge, Rutschman and Kwan
Fodder for your sports weekend …
Covering a number of subjects, including bad basketball in Oregon, the Trail Blazers’ future, Dan Burke, Gary Payton II, Patty Mills, Nike & Alberto Salazar …
A few sporting items on my mind as we ring in the new year …
• The state of Oregon is known for some pretty good basketball, but its major teams are displaying little of it so far this season.
For Chad Forcier: 25 years in the NBA, and now two rings
Most coaches never get to experience the thrill of an NBA championship.
Chad Forcier has done it twice — once with the San Antonio Spurs in 2014, this year with the Milwaukee Bucks.
“I was so fortunate to have gone through it once with the Spurs,” says Forcier, a long-ago assistant coach at both Oregon State and the University of Portland. “To have a second shot at it with the Bucks … I’m not sure that ‘living a dream’ adequately describes it. I’m keenly aware of how many players and coaches never get to taste that. I feel very blessed.”
Forcier was on the bench alongside head coach Mike Budenholzer as Milwaukee took the Phoenix Suns in six games to secure the franchise’s first NBA title in a half-century. The city was agog over the prospects. An estimated 65,000 people jammed into the Deer District surrounding Fiserv Forum to watch Tuesday night’s Game 6 on a big screen outside the arena and then celebrate afterward.
On Kevin Calabro and Jordan Kent, the sports broadcasting scene in Portland, Ime Udoka, James Allen, the Cambia Portland Classic and much more …
Knocking it around on a potpourri of sports topics …
• Kevin Calabro’s return to the broadcasting booth with the Trail Blazers is not a done deal.
The Blazers, who let Jordan Kent go last week as their TV play-by-play announcer, have extended an offer in principle to Calabro, who served as their TV play-by-play man from 2016-20 but gave up his job during the COVID-19-interrupted 2020 campaign.
Something new: A weekly menu of sports book reviews
As a service to our readers — the ones who enjoy sports books — we’ll critique an offering a week from now until Christmas.
The first one is a book written by one of my favorite writers and a great guy familiar to sports fans in this area. Bud Withers worked for a long time for the Seattle Times and P-I, but before that was with the Register-Guard in Eugene, where he came across one of the most polarizing figures ever to hit the Northwest college basketball scene.
Hey Guys! I Was Listening
Seems that Rasheed Wallace and Bonzi Wells used the occasion of a recent interview on “Rip City Drive” to engage a little hit-and-run action on my book, “Jail Blazers: How the Portland Trail Blazers Became the Bad Boys of Basketball.”