Trail Blazers draft room strategies Sunday, June 22, 2008 By BRIAN HENDRICKSON Columbian Staff Writer TUALATIN, Ore. — Kevin Pritchard will rise at 3 a.m. Thursday morning and — on three or four hours of sleep at most — begin a routine with which he is now intimately familiar. The Portland Trail Blazers’ general manager will spend the early hours leading up to the NBA Draft by reading media reports and discussing possible scenarios with members of his management and scouting teams. All that before the sun has barely breached the horizon. The group will have examined most of the details — 95 to 99 percent of the work will already be done, Pritchard says — yet they will spend the next several hours combing for overlooked nuggets. Pritchard calls this “The Process” — a day-by-day, step-by-step strategy to achieve optimum draft success. And its success cannot be argued. Each of the last two years, “The Process” has revitalized the Blazers’ franchise. It led them to pick Greg Oden over Kevin Durant last season, and to acquire the rights to Brandon Roy and LaMarcus Aldridge the year before. It pushed the Blazers to purchase late first-round picks each of the last two seasons that brought them Spanish guards Sergio Rodriguez and Rudy Fernandez, and helped set Portland up for what it hopes will be the franchise’s next great run of success. Pritchard’s year builds up to this moment. It is his personal All-Star stage, and he treats it like a coach preparing for Game 7 of the NBA Finals. “When I was a player, all I did was think about that game. Who was I guarding?” Pritchard said. “And it’s the same thing. What are the teams above us looking to do? What are the teams below us looking to do? If one thing happens that changes the whole draft, is that a possibility that day? So we try to explore every possibility.” So what, exactly, is “The Process?” It’s the scouting reports for 150 college and international players, organized and packed into a three-ring binder with statistical analysis, background information, and breakdowns of their production. It’s the hundreds of hours of digital video loaded onto a computer server, waiting for coaches and scouts to review. It’s the trade and draft scenarios, written onto dry-erase boards surrounding the draft room where team officials can visualize the possibilities while 11 telephones ring endlessly. And it’s the constant string of outgoing phone calls as Blazers officials explore every option of their draft strategy, like the floor of a stock exchange in the midst of a bull bonanza. Can they convince a team to trade its top-10 pick? Can they grab an extra first-round selection? Who can they pick at No. 33? Is there a swap to work out for any of their second-round picks? The Blazers will already know many of those answers as Pritchard rises before dawn on Thursday. “The Process” will have provided them. Thursday will be about executing a fine-tuned strategy and squeezing every possibility out of the annual event. Pritchard can not predict how it will end. But he trusts “The Process” to guide him. From:http://tinyurl.com/5oxrpr --

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