All of a sudden, we’re being told by the media and the Trail Blazers not to panic. You know — hey, it’s ONLY five games. Well, the first question is, who is panicking? Don’t confuse panic with simply reporting what’s going on and how the team is playing.

I mean, this is a pretty confusing situation. Even the Trail Blazers seem confounded by it, judging from some of the statements out of practice yesterday. You tell me who is panicking:  Bloggers? Fans? Players? Coaches? This from Brandon Roy:

“What is worrying me is I don’t know if we see the light at the end of the tunnel. That’s what’s worrying me,” Roy said. “I don’t know what it is. I sit there at night time and try to think about it. Who knows?”

The biggest confusion at the moment, as far as I can tell, is from the team captain and best player — Roy. Roy seems to think the solution to the problems Portland has been having is for him to have the ball in his hands even more. Jason Quick wrote this yesterday:

A variety of issues are swirling, ranging from coach Nate McMillan’s internal struggle over whether he should move Andre Miller into the starting point guard position, to star Brandon Roy wondering whether he needs to approach McMillan and ask to have the ball in his hands more.

But as Ben at Blazersedge.com proved yesterday, Roy had it plenty in the fourth quarter Tuesday. Apparently, he’s unable to tell what’s happening to him — but he’s being doubled and sometimes tripled when he tries to play one-on-one.  It’s just not working.

What Roy needs to recognize is that if he has the ball in his hands LESS OFTEN he might end up scoring more. That 1-4 set Portland has relied on so much late in games isn’t working against good teams that are well prepared. Just as we said all along it wouldn’t work forever. At some point, the league adjusts — and watching what Houston did to Roy and the Blazers in the playoff series last season taught everyone a lesson.

What Portland needs to do is get the ball in Miller’s hands and let him create for EVERYONE, not just Brandon Roy. Run Roy off picks and get him moving without the ball. Put him in some different spots on the floor — make it harder to lock in those double teams.

And in the end, as the best player and the best player at crunch time, Roy will still get his shots — but they’ll eventually be better shots than what he’s getting now. And who knows, maybe the other players will get more open than Roy and might contribute, too. That’s what the real good teams do.

Why is the coaching staff not seeing this? Why isn’t the coaching staff not forcing this to happen? I have no idea. I do not understand the reluctance to try something different. It’s pretty difficult to improve if you aren’t willing to make changes. Adjustments need to be made constantly, even when personnel doesn’t change.

And I’m tired of hearing, by the way, about all the new players and all the changes. In reality, all the good teams have added new players, some — the Lakers and Magic, to name two — have added new starters. It hasn’t caused all this turmoil. Portland lost Nic Batum and replaced him with a player, Martell Webster, who has been with the franchise since he came into the league as a high school kid. Greg Oden started a lot of games last season. The rest of the starting lineup is the same.

That’s NOT a huge change, as it turns out.

It’s time to move forward, isn’t it?

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Ben Golliver at Blazers Edge, one of the hardest-working men in show business, has uncovered a bunch of old Oregonian special sections featuring the Trail Blazers and has turned them into a slideshow.

You can find it here. I wish I could tell you stories about my part in writing some of these features. But honestly, when it comes to postseason special sections, in those days I was always on automatic pilot. It was a long season and I cannot for the life of me remember writing any of these stories.

Vaguely, I remember the layout of these sections, but it’s all a blur. I think I remember Kerry Eggers’ stories better than my own. They were probably better. It’s not that I’m old, it’s that by this point in the season, I was always so tired from covering an entire season and a playoff run, that I was more robotic than I cared to admit at the time. And in a couple of these seasons, I turned right around and spent the next month writing a book about the season with somebody else.

But talk about a different time. Ben was wise to include so many of the ads in the sections. In those days, the sales people were always dinging us for special sections — because anything with Blazers on it sold like crazy. The ads were large and plentiful — thankfully, because it meant we needed fewer stories to fill the section.

As good as things are now for the team, they aren’t as good for newspapers and the economy in general. You don’t see those special sections as often — although The Oregonian did one today for college football. They got Fred Meyer to buy pretty heavily in this one, but other than that, the ad load is embarrassing compared to what the old Blazer sections used to carry.

Times change. Thanks for the look back, Ben. Would love to have the kind of energy I had in those days.

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So we know from this column that Dana White met with The Oregonian sports editor earlier this week to talk about getting some coverage of Saturday night’s pay per view in the Rose Garden.

Now you can think what you will about the UFC or MMA in general – and I’ve heard it all from “human cock fighting” to “the only sport out there that is on the rise rather than the decline” — but I just wonder if anyone down there knows who Randy Couture is. Seriously.

Again, think what you will of this sport but the man is an icon. He’s a Hall of Fame athlete and person. He’s doing a major benefit  to help fight autism (donating his personal Hummer for an auction) before during and AFTER his fight, win or lose. He’s built an incredible career and people are willing to pay huge money to watch him step into the octogon.

Seriously, when is the last time an event came to Portland and sold $600 tickets, scaled down to a low of $50? Like never. This isn’t some event where you can spend a few bucks at a grocery store and get two free tickets. This is a big-time show, whether you personally care for it or not.

And today was the first day the town’s daily newspaper even acknowledged it. Sorry, but that’s not right.

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I can’t find evidence of it online, but the headline in the print edition this morning in The Oregonian apparently said, “Exhale, Rip City”.

Really? You mean people doubted he’d eventually sign? Wow. Seriously, I’d love to hear from people who were worried about this. And hope they’d explain why.

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Big “scoop” yesterday on Oregonlive.com. It seems Greg Oden worked out a while back with Brian Grant, who flew back to Ohio State to spend a few days with him. It got picked up all over the place and people were actually asking me, “Did you hear about Brian Grant working out with Oden?”

Yeah. And you would have, too, if you’d been paying attention. Kerry Eggers had it in the Portland Tribune on July 2, which of course was a more than three weeks ago. That inspired me to this blog post on July 3, referring to Eggers’ column.

But I guess it’s not official until The Oregonian writes it. Which means maybe in a couple of weeks we’ll read about how Oden did yesterday at the U.S. National team mini-camp.

UPDATE: A minor point, I admit. But the whole premise of this story on Oregonlive.com headlined “Nate McMillan wants more gold” is the first few words, which say, “Nate McMillan wants to add to his gold medal count.” You know, by coaching, again on the national team staff. I bet he does want to add to his medal count. I’d like to add to mine, too. Right now, me and Nate have the same amount of gold medals — zero. I thought everyone knew coaches don’t get medals. Never have.

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Kudos to Jason Quick for breaking this story. It says Portland is going to make an offer that’s going to burn all its cap space on the Utah power forward, who is a restricted free agent.

I love Millsap, a rebounding machine whose motor seems to run in high gear all the time. But I’m not sure it’s the right move for the Trail Blazers. First off, I can’t understand how they’re going to be able to play him enough minutes to make him worth the $9 million or $10 million he would cost. There’s already Joel Przybilla backing up Greg Oden and that leaves just the 12-14 minutes a game Millsap would get behind LaMarcus Aldridge. You can’t give a guy playing just 14 minutes a game that much money.

And I’m not sure, even at that price, Millsap wants to come here and not play any more than that. He deserves his chance to be a starting power forward in the NBA. All I can think of is that perhaps the Blazers might be considering trading Przybilla, but with Oden’s fragility to date, that seems a little premature.

I think I’d like it much more if the Blazers just held onto that cap space until later, when some team comes to its senses about its high payroll combined with next year’s low salary cap and wants to dump salaries. You might get a more suitable and talented player in a few months.

Patience here is likely better than making a hasty move.

Handing over large salaries, particularly long-term contracts, to players who don’t figure to be starters any time soon is a very dangerous thing to do for your franchise’s health.

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Rachel Bachman did a very good job with this story about the selling of soccer to the hooligans and punks of America. She got the money quote from a former commissioner of the MLS:

Forget the kids. The future of Major League Soccer is in young, scarf-snapping, mostly male rowdies, former commissioner of MLS Doug Logan says.

“Soccer audiences at their best have got to be a little dangerous,” said Logan, now CEO of USA Track and Field. “It’s three guys with a beer cursing at the guy on the field. It’s not a family activity.

“If you want a family activity, go to the circus.”

And then there’s these quotes, too:

“There was always this expectation, which has turned out to be fallacious, that as kids who grew up playing soccer as children, as they grow up, they’re going to be fans to go buy tickets for soccer at a professional level,” said Marc Ganis, president of Chicago-based sports consulting firm Sportscorp Ltd. “It hasn’t worked out that way in huge numbers. It just hasn’t.”

When the MLS launched in 1996, a faction of team owners thought the key to success was to attract the nation’s soccer moms and their kids, said Logan, league commissioner until 1999.

“And nothing could be further from the truth,” Logan said. “Team sports is tribal — and, unfortunately, male. In its finest heyday on ESPN, on ESPN2, the audience (demographic) for the WNBA was 71-72 percent male.

“Women don’t turn television sets on to watch stuff except maybe gymnastics, swimming — you know, on an Olympic year — and skating. You can’t force something there that isn’t there.”

A sport that chooses to market itself to people who want to behave this way is asking for some major trouble.

First, you’re not going to have much of a chance, in this country, of ever gaining mainstream acceptance. Second, at some point somebody is going to get seriously hurt or die and then your whole league is going to end up in a courtroom trying to prove it didn’t encourage the very behaviors that caused the death.

And losing a lawsuit like that, which you would, could shut your whole league down.

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It says here that the Blazer owner has told his general manager to “go for it.”

So before this, they weren’t going for it? Who knew?

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Hot scoop — sports teams are selling all-you-can eat deals along with game tickets. Geesh, it’s been going on at the Rose Garden now since Global Spectrum operated the joint. As near as I can tell, it’s been spreading all over major-league baseball now for about three years.

And this is a Page 1 story in Portland? Yup, like I say — there’s a lot going on in this hamlet.

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I wasn’t even going to comment on this thing, which appeared Wednesday in The Oregonian,  but now that I see some people are actually taking it seriously, I probably should point out a few things. The study found some bias by NBA referees, mostly for teams trailing in games and series, and for home teams.

Where did these researchers get the data for this study?

After collecting data for the latest study, culled from play-by-play accounts on ESPN.com, the researchers stumbled into the “home” and “close-game” bias findings, Stone said. Price said the study’s most interesting conclusion is that officials might exhibit biases — conscious or unconscious — that could benefit their employer.

So they’re judging bias about calls based on play-by-play sheets, rather than actually seeing the calls? They’re just eliminating anything that could happen in game situations of these sort and pinning the data on referee bias? Without even actually seeing the calls?

Could it be that teams trailing in these situations simply play harder? Or that teams leading let down? Or that teams leading tend to substitute inferior players, whether they are ahead in a game or in a series?

What the researchers are doing here is finding a statistical blip and then attaching a reason to it. Without actually seeing the calls, is it possible to assign bias to them just based on the fact that they happened?

And how much difference do said calls actually make? Well, deep down in the story you’ll find out how small the “bias” actually is:

Randy Bluffstone, professor of economics and department chair at Portland State, reviewed the study at The Oregonian’s request and found it to be generally rigorous and relevant, especially given the frequent fan discussions of NBA officiating.

“I think the work is, in the main, quite well done,” Bluffstone said. “The thing I just don’t see is big effects. We can be really sure that they exist, but they’re pretty small.”

The home-team advantage, for instance, would yield about one extra turnover every three games, Bluffstone said.

He also called the study’s detected advantage for a team trailing in a playoff series “statistically insignificant.”

Uh, one turnover EVERY THREE GAMES?????? Now there’s some bias. I’m sure every fan watching a game can detect that. One turnover every three games? That’s a bias so small it’s not even worth detailing.

Talk about “statistically insignificant.” That’s kind of what the study is in the first place.

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