The Portland Trail Blazers will honor their 2000 Western Conference Finals team as they host the Detroit Pistons tonight, Mon. Dec. 22 at the Moda Center. We got a few Blazer’s Edge staffers to write about that team.
Kevin Lawler
Don’t talk much about the 1999-2000 Portland Trail Blazers. It’s too painful. There are too many “What if’s” to consider. I can only imagine the championship parade that we never got to attend.
But we should talk about that team even if it brings up some tough memories. Tonight, the Blazers
will honor them during their game against the Detroit Pistons, and it’s about time.
That squad’s 59-win season and thrilling run through the playoffs is worth celebrating. I, for one, will never forget it. When the hated Los Angeles Lakers came to town in February with both teams riding 11-game winning streaks, I was there, about as high up as you can get in the 300 level. We lost that one, but two excellent teams were setting the stage for an epic battle to come.
When the Blazers reached the second round of the playoffs a few months later, I scraped together whatever cash I had saved, lined up at the G.I. Joe’s in Gresham, and scooped up a couple of 300 level tickets. My first playoff game.
A few days later, walking down the street, I found $40. Unable to identify the rightful owner of that pair of $20 bills, I put them in my pocket and headed to G.I. Joe’s.
That night, I sat in the second-to-last row to watch the Blazers and Jazz again. Portland sports legend Joe Becker was a few seats down and I asked him why he couldn’t get better seats. Turns out he got the night off at the last minute and decided to take his kid. I’ve heard people say that watching games on TV is better than sitting in the nosebleeds, but I’ll never agree. There’s nothing like being in the building. You never know who you’ll meet and you never know when you’re going to see an instant classic.
That game was special. Scottie Pippen drilled a deep, clutch three. The Rose Garden was so loud that Utah’s players and coaches complained that the rims were shaking. It just made us louder as Bryon Russell missed a pair of free throws in the closing seconds. I thought Jerry Sloan’s head was going to explode. The Blazers were moving on to the conference finals to take another crack at the Lakers.
Before Game 4 of the Western Conference Finals, I was playing tennis at my high school when I saw my mom’s station wagon roll into the parking lot. She got out of the car and called out to me. In pre-cell phone days, that’s how urgent messages were shared. She had just gotten off the phone with the father of one of my good friends. He’d gotten his hands on a few extra tickets to that night’s game.
So there I was, a few short hours later, watching the Blazers and Lakers not from my usual perch in the 300 level, but from a suite. The Blazers lost that game and trailed in the series 3-1. But I still believed.
Something special was happening. I kept finding myself at these games, witnessing this run. Chanting “Sheeeeed” when Rasheed Wallace caught the ball in the post. Delighting in the rhyming of “A six-eight great from Michigan State, number eight… Steve. Smith!”
So when Game 7 entered the fourth quarter in Los Angeles, I was glued to the TV, confident, plotting my next run to G.I. Joe’s. But it wasn’t meant to be after all. The Kobe to Shaq alley oop is still seared into my brain.
For a quarter-century, I’ve been waiting to avenge that loss.
I wasn’t around in 1977. The 1990 and 1992 NBA Finals teams were among my earliest memories. Those teams ensured that I would be a lifelong Blazers fan, but it was the 2000 team that I remember best. It came along right as I was becoming more independent, finding free parking at Lloyd Center, able to earn and spend a few bucks for 300 level tickets. I was there. And somehow I just knew we were going to win it all.
But things don’t always work out. That Game 7 loss to the Lakers still hurts. And I should probably know better by now, but I still believe. Tonight, we’ll celebrate that team. Hopefully it won’t take another 25 years, but someday we’ll avenge that loss. It will be sweet, and I will be there.
Brandon Mullen
I’ve been a Blazers fan since I was four years old. I had nearly every basketball card for every Blazers player throughout my childhood, wore 44 in high school in honor of Brian Grant, and I was in the Moda Center – in the standing room only section deep in the 300s – for Dame’s 0.9 shot to send the Blazers to the second round for the first time in a generation.
But for me, there was something formative – for good and for not – about the 1999-200o team… and additional formative moment years later.
First, the bad, and the obvious: the Blazers blew a 15-point fourth quarter lead against the Lakers in Game 7 that would have taken them to the Finals and possibly a championship. That was formative. It was soul-sucking. It sort of killed off the childhood-adjacent relationship I had to the Blazers to that point because I really, REALLY thought that was going to be it.
Which brings me to the formative moment years later when, during my first stint with Blazer’s Edge, our very own Dave Deckard asked if I wanted to audition for a hair coloring commercial. I thought he was kidding. He wasn’t. One recorded video and one online call later, and Vox Media – owners of SB Nation – literally flew me to New York City to film a commercial about it. No, that’s not a joke:
As cringe as this commercial was, I had never been to New York City, and for a kid for Corvallis who didn’t travel a lot, it was an unreal experience. I bought my first pair of Dames there (the Dame 2 Aurora Borealis, which I still have!) And, of course, the above timeless classic.
The last formative moment came before the other two. It was 1999. The Blazers played a preseason game against the Sonics at Gill Coliseum in Corvallis. As a young teen an hour-plus south of Portland with parents who (as mentioned before) didn’t do much traveling, I attended no Blazers games growing up despite being a massive fan. When the Blazers actually came to Corvallis, it was a huge deal. I wandered onto the court during warmups and was completely blown away by how impossibly tall Arvydas Sabonis was. It literally felt like being next to a giant.
After the game, one player signed autographs before hopping on the bus: Brian Grant. And he signed autographs for every single solitary person there, including one on a shirt for me, even as you could hear other players shouting at him from the bus to hurry up so they could leave.
That made an impression on me. And I find that memory impossible to separate from how I think about, write about, or podcast about the team now. And it’s why, when the Blazers honor the 2000 team tonight, I will be at the Moda Center, wearing the jersey of a man who gave me an autograph on a shirt that I will be wearing beneath that jersey.
