After Kings basketball president Geoff Petrie tinkered with his roster these last nine months – dealing away veteran pieces of a complicated personal nature and adding youth, athleticism and quality characters – a natural question was being asked by a number of colleagues who work so closely with him.
Could they become the Portland Trail Blazers of the 2007-08 season? While the new franchise face, Greg Oden, sat out his rookie campaign nursing a surgically repaired knee, the Blazers entered with bottom-feeder expectations and still made a playoff push. They meshed young talent and won with a high-energy style, capturing the national spotlight during a 13-game winning streak that was the high point of a 41-41 season.
It was the start of what they hope is a long era of elite-level play, not to mention a path out of the dark ages when the infamously named "Jail Blazers" represented the organization in all the worst kinds of ways. The Kings, who open their eight-game exhibition season in the City of Roses tonight, see enough similarities to aspire for the same.
"I feel like we're going to be the same (as the Blazers of last season)," said rookie small forward Donté Greene, the latest addition to the team's core of youth who was part of the Ron Artest trade to Houston in August. "We've got our leader in Kevin Martin, talented rookies, vets like Bobby Jackson, Mikki Moore, Brad (Miller), young guys like Spencer (Hawes), Jason (Thompson). We're going to be good. If we work at it, this will be our building year this year.
"Everybody the last couple of years has been down on Sacramento. I had a couple of my friends say that, say, 'Y'all aren't going to have much fun this year.' But we're young. We can surprise a lot of teams."
For the Blazers, today marks the beginning of their next chapter. Oden, who had microfracture surgery in September 2007, is expected to make his long-awaited debut and play 15 to 20 minutes. But even before drafting Oden out of Ohio State, Blazers general manager Kevin Pritchard was stockpiling quality draft picks and shipping away players who no longer fit the new brand. As Hawes noticed, the Blazers have placed an emphasis on acquiring players with quality reputations as well in what has been a moral makeover of sorts.
"They've kind of done it the old-fashioned way, developing their own guys and then having the core of veterans around them," said Hawes, who is close friends with third-year guard Brandon Roy and played high school basketball with fourth-year small forward Martell Webster. "Another key component for them was getting the character guys. Every guy they've drafted is not only good players, but good guys, too. That helps with the image of the organization."
If nothing else, it's a worthy blueprint to follow. While the Kings of recent years have come nowhere near the Blazers of old in terms of legal troubles, there were enough off-the-court incidents relating to Artest, former point guard Mike Bibby (more specifically his entourage, Team Dime) and former coach Eric Musselman to inspire a change in direction.
Suddenly, they were drafting Hawes, a 7-footer with plenty of upside but also highlighting his appetite for politics and beyond-his-years persona. In June, they drafted Thompson, a big man with uncanny skills for his size and quickly noted he would be among the few NBA players who already earned a college degree. The list goes on, with an argument to be made that the character element played a part – however small – in the acquisition of Jackson and the five-year extension for Francisco García.
But what matters most is the performance on the floor. With no nationally televised games scheduled and a prediction by an ESPN writer that they would finish 23-59, there is plenty of room to be the Blazers of before.
"I think it's a good team to match up against, just because we've got the same goals in mind," swingman John Salmons said. "You've got two teams with a lot of young talent who are just trying to make a push for the playoffs and surprise a lot of people.
"It'll be a good measure to see where we're at."
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