And after this, I think we’ve worn out the topic:

• I was in error previously when I talked about the Trail Blazers getting Paul to agree to extension prior to any deal. I do not now believe that is possible. You can’t get a player to sign an extension until the final year of his deal, which Paul is a year away from. And when he gets to that final season, we’re going to be in a lockout, so you likely won’t be able to get him signed then, either.
• Without having him for longer than two seasons, I’d be real careful about giving up any young and promising players for him. Most teams would. Man, you might get him for only a season and a half if that lockout lasts as long as some people think it will next summer.
• People getting all over Paul for wanting his team to acquire better players may be ignoring how many other players who have done the same thing over the years. Kobe Bryant did it just a couple of seasons ago. And to a degree I sympathize with players caught on teams that are in the midst of salary dumps and obviously aren’t trying to win.
• At the same time, I grew up in an era when players were stuck with one franchise for their entire careers, if the teams wanted to keep them. Ever hear of Ernie Banks? Stuck with the horrid Cubs forever. Never whined and never complained. Just wanted to play two every day. It isn’t a player’s god-given right to win a championship, you know.
• David Stern is distressed over the whole idea of his superstars congregating on three or four teams. So are many owners. And there’s a new collective bargaining agreement coming up soon. Don’t be surprised if the owners don’t try to make it tougher on players to leave a franchise. This, of course, is going to be difficult to do in that the owners want to shorten the length of max contracts, too.
• I’ve said this before and people in Portland are livid with me about it, but if all things were equal — if Roy weren’t a base-year player, if his salary matched up with Paul and they had the same number of years left on their deals — I’d trade Roy for Paul in a heartbeat. I mean, if you’re going to have one player dominating the ball all the time, who wouldn’t pick Paul over Roy?
• The sooner this Paul talk is shut down, the sooner the Blazers can get back to a deal they can actually make — not some pipedream — to improve their team.

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I keep hearing that New Orleans wants Kevin Pritchard as its next general manager, partly to show Chris Paul it means business in rebuilding that team.

And Pritchard seems to be very interested in the job.

But one thing a couple of my friends within the league were talking about this week is a concern that Pritchard might be so anxious to get back to work that he takes the job.

It’s a lousy job. You think Paul Allen’s interference was a problem in Portland? Take a look at what the Shinn family has done with this franchise. It’s a total mess. To dive into that situation merely because you just can’t resist the first chance to get back into the league would be crazy.

Pritchard can do nothing but help himself by being selective about his next job in the NBA. Man, no matter how good you are, certain situations are a whole lot worse than this one was in Portland. And it’s a good idea not to purposely put yourself in that situation.

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According to Chris Broussard, who has been right about this stuff quite a bit, LeBron James is headed to Miami. That is, “unless he has a change of heart.”

Well, maybe so. But there’s a side of me that says this thing is just a sideshow. That this is all about the glorification of LeBron by LeBron. I can’t imagine he would be so heartless as to have a one-hour show to yank the heart out of the city of Cleveland.

I think you’re going to hear all sorts of rumors today about where he’s headed — most of them coming out of James’ camp. All of them designed to create even bigger drama for tonight’s TV production. And the whole TV thing? An unbelievable exhibit of the ego of James.

Unbelievable. And he has no idea how bad it’s going to make him look. Keep a barf bag handy throughout this show, folks. Your stomach is going to churn. I cannot think of an athlete in my time who is so all about self-glorification. His whole gimmick, from “The Chosen One” to “King James” to the chalk flying in the air before a game smacks of a Grade B professional wrestler.

But my goodness, most of them had better scripts to work with than this misguided and ill-advised young man, who so often seems to be reading his life off a teleprompter.

The guy is going to turn himself into the world’s biggest villain. And before it’s over, James — who seems to seek our love with his every move — will become the most hated man in sports. Maybe even to THIS extent (nsfw, but the best piece of writing on this I’ve found).

In the end, I think he wants us all to love him so much that he’s going to stay with Cleveland. You know, just to show us how loyal he is. What a great guy he is.

But, alas, we’re going to hate him anyway. And we should. It just seems like the right thing to do. Read more »

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In a year, the NBA owners are going to be pleading hard times to the players association, in advance — m0st likely — of locking them out of training camp.

But come on. You can’t expect anyone to buy into the idea that the owners are losing a lot of money while they’re throwing their bankrolls away this summer like drunks in a strip club (oops, sorry for the Zach Randolph reference).

I mean, max money for Rudy Gay? Really? And Joe Johnson gets the max from Atlanta after that horrid playoff series this spring? And $30 million for Channing Frye? Wow.

Bill Veeck, the great baseball general manager said it decades ago about salaries in sports and he was so right. It isn’t the price of excellence that kills you — it’s the price of mediocrity.

I’m not sure the players are going to be very understanding of the owners’ plight. This thing is getting pretty wacky and it’s barely started. There’s too much cap room this summer — and too much available money.

It’s funny, but it DOES sort of prove that the NBA needs new regulations. Tighter monetary restrictions of some sort are necessary, we can see that. It’s the only way to save these fools from their own idiocy.

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Except me.

Yes, I know — best teams in the league. Long, long traditional rivalry. The matchup everyone wants to see. Blah, blah, blah.

But for me, the biggest problem the NBA has is that the same damn teams are winning the championship all the time. No other major sport has had just a handful of teams monopolizing its championships the way professional basketball does. And I think over the long run, it hurts the league.

I’m sick of Boston or Los Angeles winning titles over and over.

Yes, TV ratings will be sensational for an NBA Finals featuring the Celtics vs. the Lakers. And I’ll watch, too. For sure. But please, at some point, that league needs to show other franchises that they have an opportunity to win a title. There has to be at least a promise of parity. Man, I cannot believe the fans in so many NBA cities have been able to maintain hope after all the years of futility. Won’t, at some point, they just stop caring?

Or — believe it or not — maybe people out there in some markets are going to start believing the league is fixed.

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Geoffrey Arnold speculated yesterday that the Trail Blazers ought to be making a run at LeBron James. Well, whatever.

To me, any amount of time the team spends trying to figure out how to get James is time it should spend trying to figure out how to do something a little more realistic. I mean, really, you think James wants to come to Portland? Really? And why would that be?

To pay a whole lot more state income tax than he’d have to pay just about anywhere else? To sit in the rain all winter? Nah, I doubt it. Look, the guy is trying to become the next Warren Buffett. Or Donald Trump. Not the next Sam Adams. I’m not sure how Portland would fit better in that scenario than say, New York, New Jersey or Chicago.

And just to clarify — Portland has no cap room. You cannot go over the salary cap to sign a player unless he’s already on your roster. And to do a sign-and-trade, the player himself would have to agree to sign that contract and to the trade in order to make it happen. In other words, you really can’t trick a guy into coming here — he’s got to be on board with it. I just don’t see any James will agree to that.

And as I mentioned yesterday, the hot new rumor is that James is going to end up in Chicago with the Bulls, with John Calipari as his coach. I think, more than anything, with James it’s a “big-city-bright-lights” deal.

We don’t make the cut in that category.

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Yes, I know, I teased you once before — but Donaghy’s plane connections fouled up that appearance. He’s promised CIP he’s ready to go Monday morning and we should have him on for more than one segment, beginning sometime late in the 7 o’clock hour.

We are hoping to get some phone calls in to him, too — so you’re in line for questions right after me!

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Funny how everyone seems to know this. In the NBA, the aggressive teams seem to get the calls from the officials. I don’t want this to be a discussion about officials, because I think this is probably the way it should be — you take the ball to the basket, be aggressive on offense, you really should be the one who gets calls.

My question is this — why is it that teams, facing a Game 5 or Game 6 in a playoff series, are NOT aggressive?

When a Nate McMillan, for example, says after the Game 5 in Phoenix Monday night that his team wasn’t aggressive, my question is a simple one — why in heaven’s name wasn’t your team aggressive? How does that happen? I can understand getting beat. That happens. Some nights the ball doesn’t go in — or for whatever reason your team just isn’t good enough to win.

But how in the world does it happen that you aren’t aggressive? Is that a coaching thing or a player thing? Seriously, I’ve never understood it and not ever seen much of it in the playoffs until the last few years — where you suddenly hear it all over the league. “We weren’t the aggressors.” Damn, why not?

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Now maybe I don’t totally understand the rule, but from what I saw last night, I cannot believe this is what the NBA really wants. Seriously, every rule has to be explored to make sure it can’t be exploited past what makes sense.

If you can actually do what the Golden State Warriors did last night, it has a chance to change basketball as we know it. The Warriors were able to use Devean George after he had acquired six fouls — and paid such a small price for it, a technical foul.

Think about it. LeBron James or Kobe Bryant fouls out — hey, I’m not going to go along with that if I’m coaching that. I’m going to take a technical foul and — hell, the other team could miss the free throw and it would cost my team NOTHING — and put him right back on the floor.

Yes, I realize you have to have used all your other bench players. Fine, put them on the floor, have one of them foul and then get them out of there. No harm in that.

Man, they ought to have to do what colleges do — if you run out of able-bodied players you play with four. Or three. And that ought to teach you that in a league where the mandate is to dress eight players, you better make sure all eight are able to play. If they aren’t, you deserve that fate.

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Man, the first quarter last night was a thing of beauty for the Utah Jazz — and basketball purists. The Jazz sliced and diced the Portland Trail Blazers, spread them out, isolated them and cut them up, laying them bare at both ends of the court in front of about 20,000 people.

Seriously, the new buzz words for the past several seasons in the NBA are cliches by now… all I’ve heard lately from teams is how they need to find players who can “create their own shot.” Yeah, well… I’m old-school. I admit that. But I remember when basketball was a beautiful team game –when it was systems that created shots. And that’s what I saw from the Jazz last night.

Jerry Sloan has never been coach of the year? What a joke. He’s one of the last holdouts who plays the game the right way, who has a system at both ends of the court and sticks to it — and makes sure his players do, too.

Did you see the Jazz just handing the ball to a player last night, asking him to go one-on-one to get a shot? And it’s not as if they couldn’t do that, either. Deron Williams could do it any time. But he works within a proven system that provides great shots for everyone — and Williams has no trouble getting his within that system.

Rick Adelman does this. So do Phil Jackson and Larry Brown. They understand that moving the ball, moving bodies and demanding that players be disciplined within a team framework is critical to winning basketball. For all you young people who think basketball is nothing but isolations and clear outs, who think you win by just handing the ball to your best guy and staying out of his way — well, get your hands on a video of last night’s game.

A lot of fans think that just because John Stockton and Karl Malone were in Utah so long running pick-and-rolls, that what Utah does is pretty predictable. But no way. Even in those days, the Jazz would come at that play in so many different ways, from so many different angles. You’d have to stop all sorts of back cuts, off-the-ball screens and player movement before they got to that play.

And you wonder why Malone and Stockton stuck around for almost two decades, playing in nearly every single game that whole time? Well, they were never asked to carry the same load that a Brandon Roy carries on a nightly basis — the task of taking the ball in the middle of the floor and constantly trying to beat multiple defenders on the way to the basket.

I get so frustrated with people who think that’s how you play winning basketball.

Look, last season the Houston Rockets ate the Blazers alive in the playoffs — and Portland came away saying it needed one more player, in addition to Brandon Roy, who could get his own shot. Meanwhile, the Blazers had been carved up by a team with NO players who could get their own shot but instead played a team game, stayed within a structured group of sets, ran plays, worked to get each other open.

Is nobody paying attention to this? Your system is supposed to get you shots, too — but it doesn’t happen here very much.

And at the other end of the court, well, it’s the same thing. For most of the first half, the Trail Blazers couldn’t get an open look. They had trouble getting to the basket and getting open threes. The Jazz got out to Portland’s guards while still being able to seal off the inside as well as anyone the Blazers have played.

Rudy Fernandez, Andre Miller, Martell Webster and Steve Blake combined to go 8 for 39 from the field. Jerryd Bayless was 5 for 12, but made that many only because he was relentless in his pursuit of cheap buckets late in the game when the issue was decided.

In the second half, things became a little more equal because Carlos Boozer left in the middle of the third quarter with a calf strain, right about the time Williams went to the bench with his fourth foul and Utah was pretty bad at the foul line. Besides, the trailing team, especially at home, always gets that run in the second half.

(By the way, it was a typical LaMarcus Aldridge game — great statistics at the end of the night but if you were watching the game, you wouldn’t like what you saw. For most of the night, Boozer just annihilated him. If he hadn’t gotten hurt, he’d have thrown Aldridge off the Broadway Bridge by the fourth quarter.)

But don’t let that obscure what happened in this game. The Jazz gave the Trail Blazers a very big lesson on how the game is supposed to be played. And it’s real important that everyone understand that.

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