and on the 28th day we finally get to see them play

Only a few days left until the season opener in Los Angeles. I thought last summer there was more anticipation and conversation about the upcoming season than I had ever seen. Well, this year there has been even more. I’ve been hungry for a chance to see what this group of players can do. The last few months have been fun, the draft, training camp, the arrival of Rudy, our first glimpses at Oden playing in the red and black, and that first preseason game against the Kings.

There has been a lot of news about this team over the summer. Some stories have caught my interest more than others. Whether the Darius Miles experiment in Boston or which player would fill the fifteenth roster spot fancied you more….one thing is certain. We will no longer have to distract ourselves with this stuff. Tuesday the 28th in Los Angeles our season will begin. We’ll finally get a chance to just kick back and enjoy watching this team grow together.

Sure, the speculation will continue. Is Nate really the best coach for the team? Should we start Outlaw or Batum? Or should Rudy be the starter and Brandon Roy moved to small forward? What about that bounty on Greg Odens head? But now we get to actually see our guys play. We get to ooh and ahh at the slam dunks and the fast breaks, and we get to grumble about officiating calls, and the coaching, and the play of whatever player that we’ve decided to make our personal scapegoat.

It seems fitting that we open the season against the Lakers, a team many of us see as our biggest rivals. The stars will be out in LA, and it will be interesting to see how our guys match up against a team that made the finals last season and is picked to do so again this year.

The two voices in my head have been arguing about this game for a couple weeks now. I can’t get them to stop. One says Phil Jackson will have the Lakers ready to go on opening night on their home court, and that Kobe and company will pull away and beat us by ten or more. The other voice says we’re going to surprise some people and make an opening night statement to the league.

I think that’s something thats more likely to occur Friday night in Portland when the Spurs come to town, than it is Tuesday night in Los Angeles. But I do think our guys will be ready to play and will not embarrass themselves in Tinseltown. The spotlights will be all over Greg Oden in his matchup with Andrew Bynum. With all the recent talk of bounties on Greg I see him taking this game as an opportunity to show everyone he will back down to no one. I heard him say that was the purpose of all the fouling he did last year in summer league. All those fouls had some people worried that he’d be in foul trouble a lot. Well, it certainly hasn’t been an issue in preseason.

By all accounts the Blazers have one of the toughest schedules in the league for the first couple months of the season. By the time midseason rolls around this bunch will be battle tested. I think they are as ready as we are for the season to start.

Let the games begin.

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