Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Portland doesn't read like a basketball town, unless you remember what the NBA was like before it exploded into the mainstream in the Eighties: back when cities like Seattle, Baltimore, and Philadelphia moved the needle.

When someone says, 'I trusted you,' the phrase is loaded with all the actions that came from that trust: the person comes almost to embody trust, just as anyone who's always hustling can only be called a hustler.

The midpoint of the NBA season comes a little after the turn of the calendar year. As we settle into the new promises we've made to ourselves, basketball teams are busy evaluating how the promises they made to themselves over the summer are going.

I think that there's something extremely beautiful about the Olympic ideal and its motto - 'Swifter, higher, stronger' - it's such a beautiful motto, and it celebrates everything which is the antithesis of death and dissolution and entropy.