Portland Trail Blazers

  Portland Trail Blazers 

Portland Trail Blazers is a team that is known to make bad decisions when it comes to draft picks, and even if they had several first picks throughout their history, they missed on players such as Michael Jordan or Kevin Durant, picking instead players that are considered some of the biggest draft busts in NBA history. But, despite of that, they have won 1 championship and had quite a few Hall of Famers playing for them. Bill Walton was the first player that ended up as a Hall of Famer for the club. He was the centerpiece that got them to the NBA Finals in 1977, when they won their single championship, with him being the Finals MVP. In the next season he also won the regular season MVP, but they didn’t manage to get to the final round this time, because of Walton’s foot injury. In the early ‘80s, the team selected Clyde Drexler in the first round, another future Hall of Famer, who played eleven years for the Trail Blazers, and was selected 8 times as an All Star while being there. He eventually went on to the Rockets later in his career and won a title with them. Sam Bowie was the center whom they drafted with their number 2 overall pick in 1984, when there was Michael Jordan still available on the table, and he ended up as the biggest draft busts in the league’s history. Later in the ‘80s, they were not such a bad team, given the fact that they made the playoffs and were on the first places in scoring throughout the league, but the bad part for them was that they exited the contest in the first round every time. The ‘90s, though, represented the most successful period in Portland’s history, with Drazen Petrovic and Clyde Drexler leading them to two NBA Finals in 1989-90 and in 1991-92. Unfortunately for them, the Blazers didn’t manage to win neither one of them, as they lost against Isiah Thomas’ Detroit Pistons in the first one, while getting beat by nobody else but Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls. Arvydas Sabonis has come to play for them in 1994, ten year after he was drafted, and he ended up being a Hall of Famer, too. In the beginning of the 21^st century, they formed a strong team once again, lead by Scottie Pippen and Rasheed Wallace. They lost in the Western Conference Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers, who were formed by Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal back then, in a very controversial ending of the Game 7, played in Portland. Later on, they passed on a future superstar of the league, when they decided to pick Greg Oden with their 1^st overall pick in 2007, instead of getting Kevin Durant, who ended up in Seattle. This was, once again, a very bad decision made by the management of the organization, Oden ending up as another big bust, because of his injury prone body. Present time, they are doing well, with Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum running the offense for them, and if Lillard will choose to sign with them a long-term contract, they will be in good hands for years to come.