A season to remember

When it’s all said and done, the Portland Trail Blazers’ 2006-07 season will be remembered as the year the team won 32 games and snagged the No. 1 pick in the draft.

Fans might also recall last season as the Year of Roy, or more accurately as the Year of R.O.Y., as it was rookie Brandon Roy from the University of Washington who dazzled fans and confused opposing teams to capture the rookie of the year award.

But it wasn’t just the lottery pick or the multi-talented Roy that made Portland’s season one to remember (and it surely wasn’t missing the playoffs for the fourth straight year, even with an 11-game improvement). Roy finished the year with 16.8 points and four assists per game, often running the offense down the stretch of games.

This is the year the Blazers and the diehards in Rip City finally got that young, talented and character-based nucleus they’ve been waiting for ever since Rasheed Wallace and Damon Stoudamire were chased out of town along with coach Mo Cheeks a few years back.

Tip your hat to general manager Kevin Pritchard. He’s the one who identified Roy as the best player in the draft, who drafted future stars LaMarcus Aldridge and Sergio Rodriguez, and who signed former Portland Stater Ime Udoka.

Of course, 2006-07 is also the year that Zach Randolph decided he could be a star in the NBA. Randolph had a career year, averaging 23.6 points and 10 rebounds a game while shooting 46 percent, and really deserved a spot on the West All-Star squad.

Admittedly, it would have been a slow climb back into the good graces of the city, but fate unloaded a once-in-a-lifetime, in-your-face moment when the right to draft Greg Oden or Kevin Durant fell into the Blazers’ lap.

Suddenly the playoffs are more than a pipe dream and hoisting a championship banner or two in the next decade doesn’t seem that off-target either. Things have changed in the Rose City forever.

For the Blazers, it was a combination of luck, karma and a GM that the fans and organization finally trust, a rarity in professional sports.

That isn’t to stay there aren’t questions to be answered. There certainly are, especially everyone’s favorite water cooler subject: Who do the Blazers draft?

But all of that hardly seems to matter. These are good problems for a franchise and its fans to have. Which superstar to take? How are we going to fit all of those new banners in the Garden’s rafters?

Best of all, with Oden or Durant here, owner Paul Allen will be more inclined to keep the Blazers where they belong: here in Rip City.