Neil Sedaka said it best in 1962. Breaking up is hard to do. It’s even harder when the person about to be dumped has done nothing wrong. Actually they were great, they loved you, they comforted you and they worked hard for you.
Steve Blake was all those things and more for the Portland Trail Blazers. He was the starting PG for a team that won 54 regular season games and finished the season tied for second in the western conference.
And he was there, making clutch shot after clutch shot. No one cared about taking care of the basketball as much as Steve, who was among the league leaders in assist to turnover ratio.
Steve came here by choice. He likely could have made more money as a free agent in 2007, but chose to come back to a team that had dumped him in 2006 for Jamaal Magloire.
But let’s be honest Blazer fans, there are reasons we went after a better PG.
Blake had that meltdown at the free throw line against the Clippers. (One more win and the blazers don’t run into Ron Artest in the first round.)
Most of his assists came on being the “ball swinger” on the perimeter rather than the “ball distributor”, forcing Brandon Roy to be the one drawing the defense in.
We all know that Steve has no desire to be in the lane on offense.
Most importantly, he was outplayed by a young sporadic Aaron Brooks at a time when the team needed a calming hand. Not someone to jack up a 3 in a crucial point of the game only to find the ball landing 3 feet short of the rim.
So that’s enough with the Blake bashing now.
The reason he has to go now is a simple one. Go to any fan forum in a city that has a bottom 20 starting QB’s in the NFL and you will learn that the backup QB is the most popular person in that city.
The Blazers owe Miller the opportunity to make mistakes without having to look over his shoulder. They owe him the minutes at the end of the game. They owe him the starting job, weather the team offered it to him or not. Just look at his career numbers.
The organization states that Blake is a professional with a great sense of team and will do what ever it takes to win. That’s fine, I even believe it, but that doesn’t account for us fans, or the assassins at the Oregonian.
We wouldn’t be so patient now would we? And that’s not fair to Miller, Nate or Blake.
- Kurt Valentine
Comments