Trail Blazers Have a Couple of Things to Analyze

PORTLAND, Ore. —  Life is still unfair, the Blazermaniacs learned Sunday.

In the ‘80s when the Trail Blazers had Clyde “the Glide” Drexler and that crew, the Lakers had Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Now that both teams have rebuilt, the Trail Blazers have Paul Allen and an $89.7-million roster and the Lakers have Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant.

It still amounts to the same thing.

For all the talk about clean slates and camping out in the lane, that’s what it came down to. A year ago these teams might have been pretty close, but this wasn’t a year ago.

“They’re a monster,” said Portland Coach Mike Dunleavy of the Lakers, not his little terrorists. “That’s why they won it last year. That’s why they’ve probably got a great shot at doing it again. . . .

“I don’t know if there’s anybody that has the opportunity to beat them. There’s only maybe a couple teams that even have a chance to do it and they’d have to play at a high level to do it.”

Some last gasp for Blazermania. . . .

You couldn’t exactly say the local fans welcomed their heroes back from Los Angeles, where they’d gone on one of their emotional benders while getting trounced twice.

But let’s face it, there’s a little dysfunction in every family, so if your teenager comes in late once in a while . . . with a police escort . . . what are you going to do, disown him?

Also, do you see any other big-league team around here that people can throw themselves behind?

Comedian Norm MacDonald, doing a gig at the local Performing Arts Center during Thursday’s loss to the Lakers, threw in some Trail Blazer digs, and was roundly booed.

The Oregonian, meanwhile, was deep into sports therapy, having dealt with Trail Blazer outrages so often, it practically had the stars of the sports-shrink biz (Bruce Ogilvie, Thomas Tutko) on retainer.

For sports psychologists, this was the equivalent of the O.J. trial, when every barrister who could walk and chew gum was interviewed by one network or another. If you were a shrink up here who hadn’t gotten a chance to explain that Wanton Anger is a Symptom of Problems That Need to be Addressed, you must have been feeling left out.

As a local practitioner named James Gurule told the Oregonian: “I tend to think of anger as a cover emotion. Often, underneath it, people are hurt or sad or scared, but anger happens to be the way it comes out.”

Happily for the Trail Blazers, they didn’t go off their rockers on national TV Sunday.

Unhappily for them, it didn’t matter. Not good enough was still not good enough.

It was just one of those seasons when nothing worked out. You know, kind of like the Laker season until this month.

Near the end of the first quarter, the Trail Blazers led by six points, a lead Dunleavy was bound and determined to hold, having lamented the loss of a nine-point first-quarter lead in Game 2.

The Lakers were putting the ball in play at midcourt with 0.6 of a second left, so Dunleavy sent in another big man, Antonio Harvey, to help Arvydas Sabonis bracket Shaquille O’Neal.

Oops! This left Devean George free at the top of the key, where he banged in a three-point shot.

Some seasons, or decades, or rivalries, it goes like that.

Someone asked Dunleavy later if this is a better Laker team than the one his Trail Blazers took to seven games in the Western Conference finals.

“I wouldn’t argue with that,” Dunleavy said. “They kicked our butts. How could you argue with that?”

For all their problems, the Lakers hit the postseason on an eight-game winning streak, with a new, if perhaps fragile, feeling of well-being.

Meanwhile, the Trail Blazers were losing seven of their last 10 in the regular season, beating only the Warriors twice and the Grizzlies.

Said Scottie Pippen last week: “I mean, I don’t know the last time we won a game. I’m trying to remember when.”

Someone reminded him about beating the Warriors and Grizzlies.

“I mean a real game,” Pippen said.

Said Pippen on Sunday: “We never really got to the point where we felt good going into the playoffs. We tried to talk it up and say what we were gonna do it, but the experience that I’ve had over the years, playing in the playoffs, it’s not a switch that you flip and it’s all going good for you.”

It’s more like a switch you flip when you turn out the lights because the party’s over.

But, as Colleen M. Hacker, a sports psychologist from Pacific Lutheran University who worked with the gold-medal winning 1996 U.S. women’s Olympic soccer team, told the Oregonian:

“I believe in the power of people to change. Who you are today does not have to be who you are tomorrow.”

Of course, where you are today does not have to be where you are tomorrow, either. Therapy is slow but a new NBA season is six months away.

Adieu, Blazermaniacs. As any Laker fan could tell you:

Better you than us.