Repairing a broken trail

Blazermania never dies, it turns out, although it did have to go into hiding for all those years while the Portland Trail Blazers tried to find it and kill it.

Talk about retro. Remember the birth of the adoring folk movement in 1977 when the team won its title and a headband-wearing Bill Walton pedaled his bike to the victory parade?

Remember someone stealing Walton’s bike?

For years, the Lakers’ most feared rival wasn’t in San Antonio but Portland, before the Trail Blazers turned into the wild bunch known as the “Jail Blazers” and started terrorizing the town.

It’s still early for Greg Oden, 20; Brandon Roy, 24; LaMarcus Aldridge, 23, and today’s young Trail Blazers, but the place once known as Rip City pulses with the old fervor.

“[Coach] Nate McMillan and I talk about this all the time,” General Manager Kevin Pritchard said. “We know we have a young team. We want to get better every single month and hopefully by April, we’ll see where these young guys are.”

In the best part, the young players aren’t just good, they’re nice, so fans can again watch the news without fear of heartbreak of embarrassment.

“It’s huge what’s going on up there with the Blazers,” Lakers announcer and former Trail Blazer Mychal Thompson said. “You combine all that with the second deepest team in basketball behind the Lakers, they’ve got something special going on up there.

“For the next 10 years, it’s going to be the Blazers and Lakers battling it out for the Western Conference.”

Or maybe with reserves such as Channing Frye, Rudy Fernandez and Travis Outlaw -- and no salary-cap problems that mean someone has to go -- the Trail Blazers are the deepest team.

In any case, with the teams in tonight’s opener on national TV and Oden facing the other great young center, Andrew Bynum, it’s like Old Times, Day One.

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Bad times, worse times

The fans really don’t matter to us. They can boo us every day, but they’re still going to ask for our autographs if they see us on the street. That’s why they’re fans and we’re NBA players.

-- Portland’s Bonzi Wells,

Sports Illustrated, 2001

If the perception was that an innocent town was set upon by ill-mannered basketball players, it was actually a team effort with a white-collar component.

Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates and cashed out to enjoy his billions, had arrived in 1988 as a dream owner, building the Rose Garden by himself, forgoing profits with a payroll that approached $100 million.

However, Allen was Seattle-based, detached and insulated by his staff at Vulcan, Inc., whom NBA people called “the Vulcans” and, indeed, seemed on their own planet.

The team was entrusted to Bob Whitsitt with orders to win, which he didn’t interpret as find us some nice young guys to develop. The Harry Houdini of general managers, he turned the roster into Hole in the Wall, offering second, third and/or fourth chances to Rasheed Wallace, J.R. Rider, Gary Trent, Ruben Patterson, et al.

Worse, some of their nicest players were serial partyers like Damon Stoudamire, who was arrested for smoking marijuana with Wallace in Stoudamire’s SUV, which a friend was driving late at night, at 84 mph, on Interstate 5 in Portland.

An entire Trail Blazers administration, devoted to unloading the problem players, came and went from 2003 to 2006 with President Steve Patterson also warring with the local media.

The Trail Blazers had long been institutionally arrogant, demanding meetings to complain about the smallest, or wholly imagined, slights like claiming that a story in the Oregonian about Indianapolis’ Conseco Fieldhouse slighted the Rose Garden.

Now the relationship became so contentious, the Oregonian hired an outside ombudsman to write about it.

The real question was who among the Trail Blazers could get along with anyone in the community?

With the dot.com bubble over and losses mounting as Allen’s bandidos, who weren’t any easier to coach than police, sank in the standings, the owner -- still ranked by Forbes as the third-richest man in the U.S. with $22 billion -- put the arena into bankruptcy when the city wouldn’t help bail him out.

By then there was no longer such a thing as Blazermania. The community gave up on the team, in self-defense.

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Bringing it back home

You could say the Trail Blazers got lucky, but they made their own luck.

A new president, Larry Miller, arrived from Nike, a local institution that managed to do business without warring with all the other local institutions. Miller brought in Cheri Hanson, a respected NBA executive who had grown up in the organization as the daughter of the team’s first publicist.

In Pritchard’s first draft in 2006, he pulled off a coup, going in with the Nos. 4 and 7 picks and coming out with the two prizes, Aldridge and Roy.

A year later, they hit the jackpot, drawing the first pick in the lottery to get Oden.

The fervor was cranking up last fall when Oden was lost after knee surgery. Still, the team they hoped could win 35 games with him, started 22-13 before finishing 41-41.

Now comes real life.

Ballyhooed, scrutinized and targeted, Oden had his ups and downs this preseason. After four games, the Oregonian’s Jason Quick wrote that Oden had been underwhelming, quoting McMillan, who asked rhetorically, “How do I get [domination] out of him?”

Meanwhile, Sacramento’s Mikki Moore and Kevin Martin bet $1,000 on who would dunk over Oden first in their game, with Martin driving the lane to jam one over a late-arriving Oden to collect.

For his part, Oden would like to soft-pedal his arrival until he does something and may be the first NBA player who asks not to put him on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

“This is my rookie year,” he said last week. “I just want to go out there and play and get my body back to what I was. . . .

“Earlier, when we were just having open gym [before camp], I was like, I’m not going to go up for this blocked shot because I’m not trying to do anything to hurt it.

“Now I don’t feel tentative, but I know I’m not as explosive as I used to be. Like I would say my vertical’s not as high as it used to be. My foot quickness is not what it used to be. And those are things I’m working on.”

In Oden’s last two games, he had 25 points and 22 rebounds in 59 minutes before McMillan held him out of Portland’s last one, the second of consecutive games. It remains to be seen how this turns out, but Blazermania can’t wait.

“I can remember five years ago telling people I worked with who aren’t from here how crazy this place gets when the Blazers are doing well and they didn’t believe me,” long-time Portland columnist Dwight Jaynes said.

“Well, they’re about to see it because it’s going to play out again.”

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mark.heisler@latimes.com

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

YOUNG BLAZERS

A look at the Portland roster:

*--* No. Name Pos. Ht. Wt. DOB Years 12 LaMarcus Aldridge F-C 6-11 240 07/19/1985 2 88 Nicolas Batum F-G 6-8 200 12/14/1988 R 4 Jerryd Bayless G 6-3 200 08/20/1988 R 2 Steve Blake G 6-3 172 02/26/1980 5 1 Ike Diogu F 6-9 250 09/11/1983 3 5 Rudy Fernandez G-F 6-6 185 04/04/1985 R 44 Channing Frye F 6-11 248 05/17/1983 3 9 Raef LaFrentz C-F 6-11 240 05/29/1976 10 52 Greg Oden C 7-0 285 01/22/1988 R 25 Travis Outlaw F 6-9 207 09/18/1984 5 10 Joel Przybilla C 7-1 245 10/10/1979 8 42 Shavlik Randolph F 6-10 240 11/24/1983 3 11 Sergio Rodriguez G 6-3 176 06/12/1986 2 7 Brandon Roy G 6-6 211 07/23/1984 2 8 Martell Webster G-F 6-7 235 12/04/1986 3 *--*