Blazers Media Day Links—Day Two

There is a ton of coverage from today's media outing with the Blazers players. I am both proud and jealous of the guys who get to cover the team for a living. For now, I will just continue to crunch numbers and bite the bullet. Here's some linkage from all over the place.

Mike Barrett reflects on previous media days and what today means to this organization.

Here's a link to Casey Holdahl with the official media day video live chat. This is good, check it.

OregonLive.com's Geoffrey Arnold has video of Brandon Roy talking about focus as well as Greg Oden and being an All-Star.

Joe Freeman also talks extensively about Oden and his confidence.

Ben from Blazer's Edge sits down with Dante Cunningham and talks about what Brandon means to the young guys. Ben also speaks with Pendergraph and shares some photos from the day.

OregonSportsLive.com transcribes interviews with the big three.

Coup from Rip City Project previews training camp and pretty much hits everything on the nose as far as realistic expectations for playing time.

This doesn't relate directly to media day, but Ball Don't Lie thinks Brandon Roy is the eighth-best shooting guard of the past decade.

Also, John Hollinger previews every team in the NBA, including our Portland Trail Blazers. It's on ESPN Insider, but here's a nice tidbit:

In one respect, however, they were horribly unlucky. Portland opponents shot 80.3 percent from the line last season, far exceeding the league average of 77.1 percent—no other team's opponents shot this well. It seems unrealistic to blame this on bad free throw defense. Relative to the league average, Portland lost 58 points because of this, which is worth about two games in the standings.

Combining this result with the Blazers' superior point differential yields a very interesting conclusion—the Blazers had the offensive and defensive results of a 61-win team and were very unfortunate to win only 54 games. What that means going forward is that the Blazers are in much better shape than most people realize.