In no NBA city is the investment/return deficit for a fan base and its team as sorrowfully large as Portland, where the only explanation for the cycle of heartbreak that stretches back almost 40 years brings to mind the line Clint Eastwood icily delivers in the climactic scene of "Unforgiven": Deserve's got nothin' to do with it.
Of the six NBA teams that don't share a market with an NFL, NHL or Major League Baseball team, the Blazers have been around the longest. That combination of longevity and exclusivity has created a bond enhanced by passion and knowledge of the sport.
"This city is pretty special when it comes to how they embrace the players that play here and continue here and making it their home," said former Blazers guard Terry Porter.
"They really embraced the guys on this team, to the point where they adopted us as sons. This has always had one of the best supporting fan bases in the league. They care about their players, they support them to the very end. Not only as players, but as guys start to retire here. You're still able to have an identity and fans still recognize and appreciate your body of work at the time when you had a Blazer uniform."
Steve Blake likes Portland so much that even though the Blazers traded him twice he has returned twice as a free agent, including the two-year contract he signed last summer.
"The first time I played here, my wife and I just loved it," Blake said. "We made a lot of great relationships away from basketball. We decided to make it our home in the offseason. Because of that, it just makes sense to play here as well.
"Here, [the fans] really feel like they're a part of the organization. It's home for them. Every team has their loyal fans; there's a lot of passionate people about their teams all over the place. But they care about their team a whole lot here. You as a player feel connected to them, and they feel connected to you. That's very unique."
They're the only fans I've ever heard chant "Dee-fense!" during a preseason game. They're the fans who showed by the thousands to welcome Greg Oden after the Trail Blazers chose him with the first pick in the 2007 draft.
And they're the fans who've had their hearts broken over and over. Oden, of course, missed his entire first year after knee surgery, suffered another knee injury in his long-delayed debut the next season, and wound up playing only 82 games for the Blazers before he was waived in 2012, destined to play the Sam Bowie role to Kevin Durant's Michael Jordan. Oden joined the long list of injured Portland stars, starting with Bill Walton the year after the Blazers' championship season of 1976-77 and continuing through the premature retirement of Brandon Roy in 2011.
"We're like the Cubs or something," said Porter, part of the early 1990s Blazers teams that came the closest to duplicating Portland's 1977 title run.
Even when Portland has been good, it has only been good enough to come tantalizingly close.
In the Blazers' past two Finals, against the Pistons in 1990 and the Bulls in 1992, they came back to Portland for the middle three games tied 1-1 but never managed to take so much as a lead in the series.
In 2000, they had a 15-point lead in Game 7 of the Western Conference finals ... and you know how that ended. They tried to reload with Shawn Kemp and Dale Davis the next season, only to have the team implode from bad chemistry, bringing on the "Jail Blazers" era, when the headlines were for bad behavior instead of big victories.
There also has been an an inordinate loss of cherished family members for a franchise that's so young. Dale Schlueter, a member of the original 1970-71 team, died of cancer in July 2014. He was preceded three months earlier by Dr. Jack Ramsay, who coached the team to its only championship. Maurice Lucas, the rugged power forward who played the role of enforcer on the late '70s teams, died in 2010. Kevin Duckworth, a characteristic Blazers underdog story who came from nowhere to become the starting center on two NBA Finals teams, passed away in 2008.
The latest blow is Jerome Kersey, who was only 52 when he died on Feb. 18 from a blood clot that reached his lung.
"I think this was the worst one, because he was so young and vibrant," said sportswriter Kerry Eggers, who has covered the Trail Blazers and the NBA since 1989. "Jerome was going to be there forever. Now all of a sudden he's gone."
It doesn't seem so long ago that fans first greeted Kersey's arrival as a second-round pick in 1984 in the draft that's best known for the Trail Blazers choosing Bowie over Jordan with the No. 2 overall selection. Kersey turned into a heck of a consolation prize, ending up among the top five scorers and rebounders in franchise history, playing with a zeal that resonated with the fans far more than his stats.
It was the way Kersey conducted himself that made him so beloved in Portland even after his playing days were done. In all of the years Eggers covered the NBA, Kersey was the only player he ever invited to his house for dinner.
"He had the biggest smile ever," Eggers said. "A very likable person, very gracious out in the public."
When Porter heard the news of Kersey's death, he had to pull his car over to compose himself. Then he turned on the stereo to hear what others were saying.
"The radio blew up with stories about him giving his time, giving to the community," Porter said. "The whole state was hurting, man, just hurting."
But as devoted as the region is to its unifying team, the passion hasn't warped perspective. There's a distinction between basketball and basic life. No false equivalency. There's been no attempt to turn Kersey's death into a rallying cry for the team, no belief that somehow winning a championship would make the pain go away.
All but two of the current players (Blake and Chris Kaman) weren't even born when Kersey entered the league in 1984. Kersey, who had served as the Blazers' director of alumni relations following his retirement, impacted them more by legacy than direct influence. There's a connection, but not an infusion.
Blake made the symbolic move of switching to jersey No. 5, so No. 25 could belong to Kersey again and forever. They are doing what they can do, not making any promises that can't be guaranteed. There is no sense they now have an additional mission to fulfill. No undue burden from the fans.
"I think everyone really wants [a championship]," Blake said. "But whether they have a championship or not, they still respect the team, the game and how hard guys work."
Winning would be a reward, not an obligation. In that sense, this might be the right team at the right time. It has potential but isn't heavily hyped; there's a better chance it could exceed expectations than become a bust. It has a touch of postseason experience, coming off the franchise's first playoff series victory since 2000 and absorbing a second-round lesson from the Spurs that showed the Blazers that "to get on their level, we have to lock in more," according to LaMarcus Aldridge.
They have All-Stars in Aldridge and Damian Lillard, size with Robin Lopez and finally depth after the summertime and in-season additions of Kaman and Arron Afflalo. They've been among the upper teams in the ultra-competitive Western Conference throughout the season. They're a top-five team in points differential and 3-point shooting. And they've got just the right amount of edge.
Allow Wesley Matthews, the team leader in 3-pointers, to break it down. Start with himself, undrafted. There's Aldridge, who wasn't considered worthy of his No. 2 overall draft selection for the first four years of his career. There's Lillard, unheralded out of Weber State. Lopez was told he's not as good as his twin brother, Brook.
"You look at our team and we have a team full of dogs and people that have had to prove," Matthews said. "We're not a cool team; I think that's when we get in trouble, when [we try to be], because we play a pretty style, the ball is flying around, that's when we're at our best. But we're not a pretty team. We're a team comprised of dogs and animals that are going to make your life tough."
"We embrace that mentality," Lillard said. "We feel like we're better than what people think sometimes. People skip over us sometimes and it allows us to keep that chip on our shoulder, to remain a humble team and a hungry team."
There are no clear-cut favorites this season. The top two teams in the West from last season are teetering on the fringe of the playoff picture. The Western teams currently ahead of Portland haven't accomplished much more than the Blazers in recent playoffs.
In other words, there are just enough reasons to believe this Trail Blazers team can do something special. And after decades of disappointment and heartbreak in Portland, maybe there are enough reasons to think "deserve" can have something to do with it.
