Portland Trail Blazers Memorabilia

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Founded in 1970, the Portland Trail Blazers are probably best known for their 1976-77 season, during which center Bill Walton and first-year coach Jack Ramsay led their team to its first NBA Championship over Julius Erving and the Philadelphia...
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Founded in 1970, the Portland Trail Blazers are probably best known for their 1976-77 season, during which center Bill Walton and first-year coach Jack Ramsay led their team to its first NBA Championship over Julius Erving and the Philadelphia 76ers. That season became the stark contrast to the team's terrible 1979-80 season, which was chronicled in a book by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Halberstam titled The Breaks of the Game. Portland's Jack Ramsay era, which lasted for 10 seasons from 1976 to 1986, was obviously highlighted by that NBA Finals win, but under Ramsay, the team enjoyed eight winning seasons, including the 1977-78 season when it won 58 games for an impressive won-loss percentage of .707. In addition to Walton, Ramsay coached guard Jim Paxson and center Mychal Thompson for seven seasons, guard Clyde Drexler for three, and forward Kiki Vandeweghe for two. In the case of Drexler, his best years with the Blazers would occur during the tenures of coaches Mike Schuler and Rick Adelman, who guided his team to NBA Finals in 1990 and 1992, losing to Dennis Rodman and the Detroit Pistons and Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls respectively. The season during which Schuler and Adelman shared coaching duties, 1988-89, also saw the purchase of the team by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who bought the Seattle Seahawks football team in 1997. From 1982 through 2003, the Blazers managed to find a way to make it to the NBA Playoffs, but in 14 of those appearances, they were eliminated in the first round. Almost certainly, the team could have used the help of a Lithuanian center named Arvydas Sabonis, who was drafted by Portland in 1986—Sabonis would not join the team until 2001. In the intervening years, Sabonis picked up a Gold Medal at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul for his play as a member of the Soviet Union basketball team, and a Bronze Medal at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona for his contributions to the Lithuanian team, whose efforts...
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