Ouch! That hurts.

In SI this week the Blazers franchise suffered a severe beatdown. In a script rewrite the Blazers replaced the Clippers as the joke. In a scene, Josh Hartnett was to say that his son was a Clippers fan and Alan Alda responded that his son "should find a less pathetic team to follow." Since the Clippers performed well this year the writer changed it to the Blazers.

I'm ok with people taking shots at the JailBlazers or the teams futility in the past few seasons but really. One playoff season doth not make the Clippers a pathetic team. The Blazers had 21 straight seasons of playoff births, 3 finals appearances and 1 championship. Yes, the team has had poor seasons the last 3 years by those standards but lets look at what other teams have done to really judge pathetic. The Clippers have made the playoffs a grand total of 4 times in the past 22 seasons. Not to mention Elgin Baylor's repeated failures, until this year, to do anything good with the team. The Golden State Warriors haven't made the playoffs since '93, one year after the Blazers lost to the Bulls in the Finals.

Or how about the Knicks? Do I need to even say how pathetic that organization is right now? The Blazers are bad but nowhere near as bad the Knicks and have actually been making progress by getting rid of John Nash and having a decent draft. The Knicks still have Isiah Thomas running the show and now he's coaching!!!

Maybe if the Blazers become perennial lottery dwellers over the next 5 years and make poor draft choices year after year it will be deserving of the title of pathetic. But until then the team is still trying and will not be truly pathetic only disappointing.