The 2005-2006 Portland Trail Blazers were bad.
Really bad.
They finished with a league-worst record of 21-61. The Rose Garden was like a morgue, with the team dead last in attendance. The roster was littered with forgettable players like Sergei Monia, Brian Skinner, and Juan Dixon. They were lit up by Minnesota's Richie Frahm for 18 points in the first game of the season. Charles Smith was actually thought to be a good option as a starting shooting guard.
Yeah, that bad.
Most other fans have forgotten that team long ago, and with good reason. But that year, the 2005-06 Trail Blazers meant more to me personally than many teams before or since.
Let me explain.
In the fall of 2005, I had just arrived to Gonzaga University to start my freshman year of college. Everything that was happening at the time was new to me. I had never been away from home before, especially 350 miles away. I had left behind my family and friends. And my girlfriend and I were attempting a long-distance relationship. I didn't know the town of Spokane, I didn't know the people at Gonzaga, and yet here I was, thrust into college and forced to survive.
Needless to say, I was scared, and I was miserable.
Those first couple of months were the hardest of my life. Homework was piling up. My roommate and I weren't exactly friends. I was missing home terribly. I missed my girl. At times I considered transferring to a school closer to home, but I knew how much harder that would be on me academically and decided to stay at GU. Still, things were hard.
And then basketball season started.
I found myself needing an escape from my predicament, and it came in the form of the 2005-06 Portland Trail Blazers. I scoured the Internet for Blazers news. I made Mike Barrett's blog a regular destination. I searched box scores, read recaps and previews, and found myself engrossed in the team.
Before the first game of the season, I discovered a "listen live" link online, and after that I listened to every Blazer game I could. The volume wasn't very loud, and I had no speakers, so I plugged in some headphones and pressed them against my ears to hear Brian Wheeler call the action. Every so often, the audio would suddenly cut out at a crucial point, and I would scramble to refresh the page so I wouldn't miss anything.
Every game, I could feel myself in the Rose Garden, watching the Blazers. I cheered for every clutch 3-pointer from Steve Blake. I could feel the blocked shots from Joel Przybilla. I crossed my fingers for every Zach Randolph 20-footer.
They were my team. My Blazers.
Every negative feeling that I had at the beginning of that academic year went away when I sat down at my computer to listen to the Blazers play. For a couple hours, my thoughts weren't on homesickness or classwork, they were on whether Darius Miles could keep up his hot streak, or which point guard should be starting.
The losses piled up, but that didn't matter to me. It was more about the feelings I had from following my hometown team despite the geography between us. The Blazers were my link to something normal, something familiar, while I was in an ufamiliar envrionment.
And as the year progressed, things started to change. As the Blazers kept me going, they also allowed me to ease into the new world I was in. I found a group of friends down the hall of my dorm, and the five of us remain friends to this day. I got involved in the campus TV station and newspaper. Suddenly things weren't so hard anymore, as I began to find my place at Gonzaga. And as the Blazers' season ended in April, I was just beginning my new life at GU.
But I still think that it was the '05-'06 Blazers who helped me through it. When things were tough, or when it felt like I was in over my head, the Blazers were there to help keep my spirits up. Yes, they lost a lot of games, but I had so much fun that season cheering them on. The team was filled with young players, rookies, and nobodies, and they were having a tough time on the court, but I felt a connection to them because of that. We were both going through tough times, but we were going through them together.
With all the success and growth the Blazers have had the past three years, it's easy to forget just how far they've come. But for me, they were the team that got me through my freshman year of college, and I'll never forget them for that.
The 2005-2006 Blazers lost 61 games and were the worst team in the league. But to me at the time, they were the greatest team in the world.
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