After four years of not being able to win a single game at the Rose Garden in Portland, Oregon, the Lakers, and especially the Lakers fans believed it was finally the time to make a change. The change, well, even though it didn’t quite occur as planned was suppose to be a Lakers win.

The Los Angeles Lakers were on a 10-game win streak coming into Friday’s game, the second of a back to back. They defeated the Miami Heat on Thursday night for their first double digit winning streak since the 2004 run to the finals season. Its great as a fan to finally be able to be so proud of a team that you’ve followed through so many tough times. Can anyone imagine what it must be like to be a Celtics fan? All those years of nothingness and suddenly they have a nice combination of players that can actually win games.

Either way, I watched the majority of yesterday’s game and the game was actually quite exciting from beginning to end. By end, I am referring to up until 2:45 left in the 4th quarter when Sasha Vujacic hit a three pointer to tie the game at 107. In case you didn’t see the stat on the program… the Lakers went 2:35+ without scoring a single basket, point, free throw, anything. There were a few close calls during the game at the end and the Blazers caught the break on them.

Unfortunately, I have been out of town for the last few days and was forced to watch the game on my laptop. The feed from NBA.com was the home game feed from the local Portland broadcast. Let me be the first to tell you all that the Portland announcers are probably the worst play by play announcers and in game analysts I have ever heard.  They make a lot of poor decisions in how they choose to “speak negatively” about other players (ie. Kobe Bryant). I wasn’t fond of how they were “shit-talking” about Kobe’s non calls and him arguing with the referees. Simply put, this was the first close game in a long time that I witnessed the Lakers not closing out a game to the max. It was a back to back, but without poor excuses, they won 10 in a row and earned the right to lose one game to a very tenacious team.  The Blazers are young and full of energy. The Lakers rotation was somewhat short last night with Phil Jackson deciding to play only eight guys throughout the majority of the night. Jordan wasn’t playing as well as he has been recently, but thats expected from a 2nd year player. Also, Sasha’s shot was off for the first time in a while, and Derek Fisher continued to struggle from the field.

Simply put, nice game played by the Blazers from opening tip til the final buzzer. It was a rare superior performance from a team as young as the Blazers. When Greg Oden joins the team, they will be very strong and will make some noise if they can manage to mesh together well; that will be a tough task for Nate McMillan next year to make sure all the young fire power can balance their attack and split the load.

The Western Conference will be very competitive this year, and probably even more competitive next year, so as a Lakers fan, I am so excited to see what will happen in the next few years!!