Over the weekend the Portland Trail Blazers honored their NBA Western Conference Champions teams from 1990 and 1992. Terry Porter and Buck Williams attended, along with family representatives of team members who had passed in the interim: Jerome Kersey, Cliff Robinson, Kevin Duckworth, Drazen Petrovic, Wayne Cooper, and Walter Davis. The Blazers even invited players who populated the deeper reaches of the bench during those years, including Ennis Whatley and Byron Irvin. Conspicuously absent was the leading player from those accomplished squads, the superstar for whom that entire era of Portland basketball is named: Clyde Drexler.
Universally acknowledged as one of the greatest players in franchise history, Drexler’s relationship with the Blazers has been on-again, off-again since he was traded to the Houston Rockets in 1995 following 12 years of service in the Pacific Northwest.