A GREAT YEAR AHEAD

Portland Trail Blazers owner Paul
Allen (right) with star Brandon Roy
in file photo.

Instead of dwelling into the negatives, Portland Trail Blazers owner Paul Allen is leaning into the positives for next season. He strongly believes that Greg Oden, Joel Pryzbilla and Brandon Roy would all be back fully recovered from injuries and look forward towards a good run in 2010-11 season, according to Blazers.com.

“Because of all the injuries we're recovering from it's really hard to pin down. We would love to get a great contribution from Greg [Oden] this year. He's gone more than the extra mile to get in shape and get ready to go. You've got Joel [Pryzbilla] who is also rehabilitating. Of course Brandon [Roy] had a few issues there at the end of the season too. It's going to be very interesting to see how they come back. So far I'm hearing very encouraging things. It would be so great to see them back out there playing 100%.

“If everything clicks, and you haven't touched on it yet but it's probably your next question, we have some new assistant coaches too, a little change with the basketball staff, we have some guys coming back and hopefully being 100% healthy, this could be a great year. Given the challenges of last year you have to keep an eye out for that and make sure everybody stays healthy. We're doing the best we can there and bringing the guys along slowly.”