Portland Trail Blazers

The Portland Trail Blazers are Oregon’s only professional major league basketball franchise. They are one of five teams in the Northwest Division of the Western Conference in the National Basketball Association (NBA).

In 1970, Harry Glickman announced a team-naming contest. Over ten thousand excited fans wrote in to name the team. The most popular choice was the Pioneers. They decided against it due to the rules that forbid the team from showing favoritism by sharing a name with any Northwestern college. The Portland Trail Blazers name is in reference to the travelers of a route used by early western settlers known as the Oregon Trail. Glickman then suggested that the team be nicknamed Blazers, a name that stuck.

The team joined the National Basketball Association in 1970 as an expansion team. After a rough start, they worked their way to the playoffs and kept up this pace until the year 2003. The team’s creation centered around Geoff Petrie, a 6-4 shooter from Princeton, and LeRoy Ellis, a rebounding specialist picked up from the Baltimore Bullets. Rolland Todd coached their first season.

The Portland Trail Blazers basketball team worked hard and brought themselves up from the bottom, turning them into one of the leagues most solid franchises.

The Portland Trail Blazers basketball jerseys sport strong colors of red, silver, white and black. Their original logo, created by Frank Glickman, consisted of a straight up and down pinwheel made of five lines with red at the bottom and black on the top. The newest changes tilt the pinwheel forty-five degrees to the right to signify the game’s motion. The logo’s three-dimensional appearance is finalized by the tapered ends and a silver and black background.

In 1976-77 the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team made it through their first winning season. Running through Portland’s first World Championship, they celebrated their only win in the NBA Championships. Bill Walton won the league’s most valuable player award. This same year they released a record album entitled, "Blazermania", that featured game highlights and player interviews, narrated by Bill Schonely.

Since then, they reached the NBA finals twice more.

In 1988, Paul Allen bought the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team for seventy million dollars from Larry Weinberg. Paul is still the team’s owner to this day. Nate McMillian, a former basketball player, took over as coach to the Portland Trail Blazers in 2005. Today the Blazers continue to work hard to once again reach the Championships.