Bracing for a year without Blazers

For the past two years I have been living in Medford, and it's become harder to follow my beloved Blazers.

Yes, I realize that the tool I am using to write this post is also part of the largest information-gathering resource known to man, the sheer magnitude of which is capable of shrinking the world in which we live. But for a sports fan, somehow, it isn't enough. We can find highlights, game recaps, interviews, commentary, fan discussions and more online. We can subscribe to satellite TV packages to watch our games from hundreds of miles away.

But to me, there is nothing like being in the city of Portland during the Blazers' season.

Getting up in the morning, and hearing the thunk of the Oregonian hitting the kitchen table. Flipping through the oily newspaper to find the sports section and read that day's game preview. Driving near the waterfront and seeing the roof of the Rose Garden rise up over the horizon. Seeing people walk down the street and wear the jerseys of players who joined the team after 1999.

There's nothing like being there.

I'm just a few hundred miles south in Medford, and it's like being on another planet. To people here, a Blazer is something you wear to a dinner party, not something you cheer for (unless you're at a really bizarre dinner party).

Around this time two years ago, I stumbled across an AM radio station here that broadcast Blazer games. It was my lifeline.

As I worked night shifts, I would drive to stories across the Rogue Valley, catching snippets of the games during the trip. In April 2010, I alternated between covering a welcome party for the troops and welcoming back Brandon Roy against the Suns.

I would wrap up an interview, then run back to the car to get an update. I would scream as I approached Grants Pass and the reception turned to a loud buzz, but I would strain to decipher any details through the static. I would linger for an extra few minutes in the parking lot at the end of the night so I wouldn't miss any of the action.

Hearing the sounds of Bill Schonely's voice interrupt the national radio show to introduce the Blazer broadcast was like Christmas morning.

I wonder if I'll ever hear it again?

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The chances of NBA basketball this season are not good. As what would've been the start of the season approaches, I'm suddenly realizing how much I'm going to miss my Blazers.

A few months ago, I wrote about how I would prefer a lockout over a Blazer team that looked unimpressive on paper. I was wrong.

Any Blazer team is better than no Blazer team.

It doesn't matter if they win 50 games or lose 50 games. They're still our team. I once rooted for the Blazers even as they slogged their way to a 21-win season, and I couldn't have been happier. In the end I was still able to root for my team no matter what happened.

This lockout takes that all away.

It could be an entire season without the Blazers. A whole year with no reason to pick up that newspaper. Nothing to keep be lingering in the parking lot. Nothing but static on the AM radio.

It's going to be a long, dark year.

Throw away the key

The NBA is officially locked out.

Look around on NBA.com, and you won't find evidence that the players even exist. Every image has been scrubbed from the Web site. In the place of the usual promotional materials, there are articles adorned with the words "standoff," "issues," and "uncertainty."

Until the owners and players learn to act nice, we're not getting any basketball anytime soon.

Good. Lock them out.

It will spare Blazer fans of another gradual step down before the team had even made it to the top.

It's hard to believe that a team with so much promise during the past four season only peaked with consecutive first-round exits. But here we are, during a time when the team would normally be preparing for the next season, and the team looks no better than when it was struggling to contain Luis Scola and Aaron Brooks in the 2009 playoffs.

Management has imploded, and the team still has no idea what direction to go in. All of the recent wheeling and dealing has just been sound and fury, signifying nothing. When the dust finally settled, the team had taken one giant step ... to the side.

Another year of the Brandon Roy Farewell Tour. He'll have a couple games where we catch glimpses of the amazing player he once was, but then force us to watch as he limps up and down the court, desperately trying to recapture something that isn't there.

Another year of Marcus Camby being a little bit older, a little bit slower.

Another year of relying on third-tier players to help win games, like Wesley Matthews and Raymond Felton.

Another season of backup point guard from Jarrett Jack, er... Steve Blake, uh... Sergio Rodriguez, uh...Jerryd Bayless, er...Patty Mills, er... Armon Johnson, er...Nolan Smith.

And of course, another year without Greg Oden.

The excitement has dimmed, and the lockout will save fans another season in which the team slips down another rung on the ladder.

Compare this to the last lockout in 1998-99, when Blazer fans were itching see the team take the court. The Blazers were ready for a full season with Damon Stoudamire, who at that time was still one of the most exciting young point guards in the league. They had Brian Grant on the boards and Rasheed Wallace starting to come into his own. Things were on an upswing after several mediocre years of watching Kenny Anderson and Gary Trent try to lead a middling team to the playoffs (two notable point guards of the era: John Crotty and Rick Brunson). Steps were finally being taken forward.

Who knows? Without a lockout, maybe this Blazer team would've been something. Maybe LaMarcus Aldridge would've elevated his game to an even higher level this season. Maybe Gerald Wallace would suddenly turn into a winner. Maybe Nicolas Batum will decide another year of erratic playing time is the catalyst to turn him into a superstar.

But is this team worth a fifth straight season of "maybe?"

The evolution of a player efficiency system

The other day I was going through some old junk in my room when I stumbled upon a long-forgotten collector's item: the Premiere Issue of Rip City Magazine from November 1992.

Inside the issue, there was a long feature on Clyde Drexler's experience at the Olympics, a Q & A with the newly-acquired Rod Strickland ("I'm looking forward to going back home to New York City with a championship ring on my finger.") and a bold prediction by Mike Rice that Dikembe Mutombo would be a bust (Short answer: he wasn't).

As I was flipping through it, I got to an article by Pat Lafferty called "Inside Player Ratings." In it, Lafferty describes the increase in the use of player efficiency evaluation.

"In the age of computer technology," he wrote "most clubs measure the production of their own players and those on other teams as well."

He wrote that one formula being used to measure player efficiency did so by adding the positive stats of a player (points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks), subtracting the negative ones (missed shots, missed free throws, turnovers, and 50 percent of fouls), and dividing the net figure by minutes played, thereby giving a performance grade for each player per minute.

Michael Jordan, for example, was the league's most efficient shooting guard, with an efficiency rating of .769. David Robinson was the most efficient center, with a rating of .814. And in large part, the system was very effective in charting the efficiency and value of the league's top players, especially when viewed nearly 20 years after the fact.

But as I read all of this, I thought "well this sounds familiar." And then I remembered John Hollinger.

Hollinger is ESPN's resident basketball statistical genius, and rose to fame after creating the Player Efficiency Rating, or "PER" for short. PER has been widely viewed as the sabermetrics of basketball, and is taken to be a very accurate account of measuring the offensive efficiency of NBA players in a way that normal individual stats cannot. Hollinger has used his PER every year to chart NBA player efficiency, and has been a go-to-source in recent years for anyone who wants to see if a player is as good as the numbers say he is.

In his words, this is how he measures PER: "To generate it, I created formulas ... that return a value for each of a player's accomplishments. That includes positive accomplishments, such as field goals, free throws, 3-pointers, assists, rebounds, blocks and steals, and negative ones, such as missed shots, turnovers and personal fouls. Two important things to remember about PER is that it's per-minute and pace-adjusted."

The two ratings systems are remarkably similar on the surface, with Lafferty's formula already in use nearly 10 years before Hollinger discovered PER. No one had ever even heard of a Player Efficiency Rating until Hollinger came around, and yet, tucked away on a two-page spread in a 1992 Portland Trail Blazers fan magazine, was a system that seemed to have been built on the same concept. Curious, I went about comparing the two formulas to see how much the two shared.

If you look closer at the actual formula that is used to calculate PER, Hollinger's is slightly modified. In Hollinger's equation, there are some fractions and percentages thrown in, as well as league averages in various statistics and a league-wide PER set at 15.00 PER also adjusts for a team's pace, because a fast-break team will have higher statistics than a team that plays at a slower pace (and I'm not even going to begin to describe how pace is factored into the equation).

Working with only the general description that Lafferty gives the 1992 formula, I can't say with certainty whether it goes more in-depth than the simple formula he described. But I think it's fascinating how something that was so simple and obscure 20 years ago turned into the most talked-about statistic today. Hollinger took something that just barely scratched the surface of player efficiency, altered it, adjusted it, expanded it, and made it into something more in-depth and complex.

Yes, Hollinger invented his PER, but the concept of a player efficiency system dates back to the years when Hakeem Olajuwon was patrolling the paint and Kevin Johnson was manning the point. Even in 1992, years before Hollinger even stepped on the scene, there was a system that accurately measured which players were better than others; creating a numerical value to take the place of personal fan debates.

But it never became popular until Hollinger's updated version was developed. In the cases where an efficiency system was used, it was relegated to fan newsletters or someone's blog. No matter what the system was or how they differed, it wasn't taken seriously, and didn't catch on in the mainstream. Maybe fans weren't ready for it in 1992, or maybe PER caught on because of the rise of the popularity of sabermetrics in baseball.

Now, it seems like efficiency matters more than individual stats like points and rebounds, and is used as a more effective tool for measuring a player's value. Any way you look at it, the concept was there, it only needed to be refined and revised, which Hollinger did with great success.

I'll bet that back in 1992, Lafferty and Rip City Magazine had no idea that the small concept they used in a filler piece would take off the way it did.