| 20 July 2009
Just a quick programming note....I’ll be an in-studio guest with Dwight Jaynes on Monday afternoon at 2 o’clock on 95.5 The Game.
Jaynes is holding down “Wheels At Work” while Brian Wheeler makes the sojourn back from Las Vegas Summer League, so Dwight was kind enough to invite me in to talk some Blazers offseason and NBA in general.
Have a feeling it will be a lot of summer league recap talk, analyzing Jerryd Bayless’ game in Vegas and – and I’m totally taking a stab in the dark here, but I’m thinking – we’ll talk some free agency in Portland. Call it a hunch.
Now that the shameless plug is out of the way, let me touch on the point guard situation for the Blazer real quick. It will be a nice little warm-up for Monday’s show. And I know Dwight’s take on this: he thinks management has a point guard in their back pocket.
For me, I believe Portland will use their veteran’s minimum later this summer to bring in a veteran journeyman (Brevin Knight, Kevin Ollie, Jacque Vaughn) to support the starting tandem of Bayless and Steve Blake – with the starting role undetermined.
While Portland went a lowly 1-4 in Vegas, and with Bayless still working the kinks out at the point, Steve Blake has been busy with his offseason regiment back East.
He recently returned from Maryland, where he put in two sessions daily in the morning and afternoons working on his game at the University of Maryland’s Comcast Center. Think we all know Blake is a gamer and he’s been really pushing himself this offseason, maybe even harder than in summer’s past because he has had time off.
Those daily workouts were jammed between Blake’s basketball camp he hosted in Maryland, where he’d workout in the morning before his camp started and then head back in the afternoon once his camp was done. By the way, Blake is all about his camps. The guy stays all day long and doesn’t leave until the last kid does.
And in this league where some guys put on camps and make an appearance one day to sign autographs and snap photos, Blake puts his whole energy into these kids at that camp. He’s there on his feet for six hours, only to turn around burnt out and put in an afternoon workout.
This went on for about a solid week.
Now, I know some in Portland are quick to debate how Blake should not run the point in Portland. Some want Bayless. Others want someone else altogether. But if the 54 wins from last year and his career-season – where much of Blake’s best play of the year came after his shoulder injury - won’t convince you to cut the guy some slack, maybe his offseason work ethic will.
You at least have to respect that.
pic via: blog/o-live.
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