The NBA Draft occurred this evening, and nobody made more moves than the Trail Blazers did. While I’m indifferent about Viktor Khryapa leaving and ecstatic that they managed to offload Theo Ratliff, I really hope that the Trail Blazers haven’t given up on Sebastian Telfair too early. The Blazers have a track record of giving up on talented players too early - the most recent case of this being when they traded away Jermaine O’Neal for Dale Davis only to watch O’Neal become an All-Star player and one of the top players in the league.

That being said, the Blazers ended the night with 2 of the top 4 prospects in the draft: LaMarcus Aldridge and Brandon Roy. They will be great additions to the young core of players, which includes the Blazers’ top two picks from last year’s draft - Martell Webster and Jarrett Jack. The Blazers just have two cancerous members left, Zach Randolph and Darius Miles, so if management can manage to work out a trade for these players, the team should be in a good position in a few years time. This young core of players will be a very effective unit, but it’s going to take a few patient years for the team and community to see results.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 28th, 2006 at 9:12 pm and is filed under NBA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.