After 4-games on the road and an All-Star break, the Trail Blazers are revved up and ready to take on the NBA's most surprising team, the Utah Jazz, in tonight's Northwest Conference showdown.

And if you like drama, you better find time for this basketball game.

Without even mentioning Greg Ostertag, Trail Blazer fans can conjure up enough hatred for the Jazz to make their blood boil and the rivalry only gets more intense as character’s within each subplot are replaced.

It used to be Karl Malone vs. the Trail Blazers frontline. Now it's future Rookie of the Year Brandon Roy versus Sophomore Deron Williams.

Williams may have edged Roy during this year's NBA All-Star Rookie Challenge by putting up 19 points and dishing 7 assists, but Roy has a chance to even the score and the season-series when it really matters.

The Jazz have also found a healthier alternative to Karl Malone in rookie Paul Millsap. The Mill-man (patent pending) hails from Louisiana Tech, the same university that produced Malone, and he’s been putting up gaudy numbers despite being under most NBA radars.

In the NBA Rookie Challenge, Millsap scored 22 points off the bench, which tied him with Rudy Gay for the team lead.

Beyond the hang over from All-Star weekend, tonight is also an opportunity for power forward Zach Randolph to prove that the NBA made a poor selection when they chose Mehmet Okur over ZeBo. Despite being 11th in the league in scoring and averaging nearly 6 points more than Okur per game, Randolph was a noticeable omission from the West’s dominant victory in Las Vegas.

Randolph also averages almost 3 rebounds per game more than Okur.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home