blazers scoring options, Oden and not drafting Jordan

taken from a post made on Mike Barrett's Blog on 4/9/10. this talks about the third scoring option for the portland trail blazers:

i have thick enough skin to not take every little thing said on a message board offensively or advesarily.

i believe it was in the previous thread, but i did mention that Greg was supposed to be the third option (maybe even the second). now don't get me wrong because i don't intend to throw him under the bus, but we need to be able to rely on the person to be healthy. we've yet to see that. again, don't get me wrong because i like Greg and i hope he does emerge as a major option for us in the long term. i'd love nothing better than to see him prove the naysayers and critics wrong and proceed to have a great career.

my point in thinking Nicolas could be a guy like that in the future is based, in large part, to his level of improvement from last year to this. additionally, the silver lining to his injury this season is that it was not to his leg, knee, ankle, etc. it's my understanding that those injuries have a more deletarious long-term effect on an athlete's body than a shoulder injury (generally speaking, of course).

also, i'm not even really talking about any of this happening after Andre's retirement. this guy's only missed five or six games over his entire career ... i think he has several years left in him. he is the option right now; i'd like to seem him be more of a distributor sometimes, though, rather than a shooter.

the draft with Jordan, et al was before my time, but i'm tired of hearing about it. it's my understanding that we already had Drexler and that we weren't really looking for the same type of player. what we needed was a center so we drafted the next-best guy. in looking this up i also learned that it was Bowie who we traded (with a draft pick) to get Buck Williams who, i'm told, was the final piece we needed to make our championship runs in the early 1990s.

it's ironic that people are cricizing the blazers now for doing the same thing in the Oden-Durant draft. i, for one, do not feel it's justified. i have faith in Greg; i just hope he can come back as well as he did before ...

... and speaking of Greg, does anyone have an update on whether he might be back for the playoffs, or at least the second or third rounds should we get that far?

~ Kassandra