The Portland Trailblazers had the opportunity to trade Darius Miles and Theo Ratliff to the Knicks for the huge, expiring contract of Penny Hardaway and a first round draft pick, but didn’t pull the trigger.

Apparently, it was because owner Paul Allen couldn’t shake his inexplicable love affair with Miles.

That one was a no-brainer. It was like taking candy from a baby. But Allen, along with former coach Maurice Cheeks, was responsible for Miles’ signing a long-term, above-market-value contract with the team in the first place, and he apparently wasn’t ready to part company with him.

Allen is apparently scared of trading away young players only to have them blossom elsewhere. He’s still reeling from the loss of Jermaine O’Neal several years ago. The difference here is that Miles is 24 while O’Neal was just 22 when the Blazers traded him to Indiana. In the NBA, those two years are crucial. Miles is physically gifted, but if he hasn’t made major strides in his game at this point, then he probably doesn’t have the work ethic to become a superstar in the league.

I think, based on the performance of Knicks’ GM Isiah Thomas over the past few years, that any trade he proposes to you is proabably a good deal…for you. I still don’t understand why the Blazers passed on Chris Paul. Maybe Paul Allen should just give me the GM job. Give me an assistant who is a salary cap expert and I’ll put together a playoff team in Portland.

The Associated Press selected Duke’s J.J. Redick as their Player of the Year while the United States Basketball Writers Association gave its POY award to Redick and Gonzaga’s Adam Morrison. This is the first time in its 50-year history that the USBWA has given the award to two players.

The AP award has been won by four Duke players in the last seven years. Elton Brand (1999), Shane Battier (2001) and Jay Williams (2002) preceeded Redick’s award this season.

On Selection Sunday, CBS’ Clark Kellogg said that this would be the first year that the four #1 seeds would make it to the Final Four. Two weeks later, we’re looking at a Final Four without a #1 seed for the first time in 26 years. Reportedly, only four contestants in ESPN’s Tourney Challenge picked the four remaining teams correctly and one of them mistakenly picked George Mason because they were thinking of George Washington, a team that was ranked in the top 10 for most of the season. There is no word on how many brackets these particular contestants filled out. It would be quite impressive if it were one or two, but if it was 50 or 100, not so much.

I wouldn’t mention my bracket if not for how it went down in flames on Saturday and Sunday. Having correctly picked six of the Elite Eight (missing only LSU and George Mason), I was in first place and all of my Final Four teams were still alive. Of course, I picked Texas, Memphis, UConn and Villanova. Each team was favored and each team subsequently lost. You might think that this would send me to the looney bin, but I was actually more impressed with how the four remaining teams played and I’m happy they won.

This Final Four is all about grit. Take #11-seed George Mason, who shrugged off the Selection Sunday bid controversy to dispatch #6-seed Michigan State, #3-seed North Carolina, #7-seed Wichita State and #1-seed Connecticut in overtime. Though I had UConn winning it all, I couldn’t help but root for the Patriots, whose feisty play put the Huskies’ “cooler-than-thou� attitude to shame.

More after the jump.

The Western Conference playoffs are shaping up…oddly. Due to a quirk in the seeding system – where each division winner is given one of the top three seeds – the conference’s two best teams, San Antonio (55-16) and Dallas (54-18), will probably end up with the #1 and #4 seeds. This means that the two best teams in the West would meet in the second round of the playoffs instead of in the conference finals.

If the playoffs were to begin today, the bracket would look like this:

#1 San Antonio (55-16) vs. #8 Sacramento (36-36)
#4 Dallas (54-18) vs. #5 L.A. Clippers (41-29)

#2 Phoenix (47-23) vs. #7 L.A. Lakers (38-34)
#3 Denver (40-32) vs. #6 Memphis (41-31)

Imagine you’re the Clippers and your reward for finishing fifth in the conference is a first round date with Dallas and a potential second round matchup with San Antonio. The Clippers would be much better off losing a couple of games and finishing sixth, getting a first round matchup with Denver, the worst of the three division winners, before a potential second round series with Phoenix, a team that is both banged-up and struggling.

Whenever there is incentive to lose on purpose, there’s a problem, and the NBA needs to fix this one.

At the NFL team meetings, new Green Bay HC Mike McCarthy said that the team would like Brett Favre to give them a decision on whether or not the quarterback will play this season.

McCarthy said the Packers do want Favre to make his decision by Saturday, which is the latest deadline for the $3 million roster bonus they owe him.

But the deadline is an artificial one, because Favre’s contract stipulates the team doesn’t have to pay the bonus until September if he returns and doesn’t have to pay it at all if he retires.

Still, McCarthy said he’d like to see the issue resolved ASAP.

“I feel like it’s Groundhog Day. I’ve been answering the question the same way for two months,” McCarthy said. “The bonus, that’s pretty much the goal we’re trying to set (for a decision). Obviously, you keep moving back the date, (but) there’s a reason behind the date. So, we would definitely like to know as soon as possible.”

This has been a case of the tail chasing the dog. Favre wants to see offseason improvement before he decides to play another season and the team can’t have a truly effective offseason plan if they are unsure about Favre’s desire to play. It sounds as if McCarthy is going to hold Favre more accountable for his interception count, but that has a lot to do with other facets of the game – talent at the WR position, an effective running game and a good defense.

If the Packers are able to draft DE Mario Williams or LB A.J. Hawk with the #5 overall pick, it would certainly help the defense. The team is also looking at Charles Woodson.

Woodson, the fourth pick in the 1998 draft, is one of the highest-profile free agents remaining on the market, though his contract requests have kept him from being a highly sought-after player.

The Packers and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers appear to be the only teams making a strong run at Woodson, who turns 30 in October.

The Packers have been frugal thus far in the offseason and the question is – how much money does he want? I don’t think it’s a good idea to commit a lot of money to a 30-year old defensive back, but if Woodson is willing to come down in his asking price, then he might be a nice addition to the defense.

Oklahoma coach Kelvin Sampson will undertake the pressure of returning the Indiana basketball program to elite status. He will replace Mike Davis, who resigned in the middle of the season, saying that the program needs “one of their own.”

Indiana athletic director Rick Greenspan called Sampson’s teams “hard-nosed, disciplined and unselfish.”

“Every coach sees it as a great basketball state with tremendous coaches and players, and we will do our best to keep those players in the state,” Sampson said in a news release.

The 50-year-old Sampson, AP’s Coach of the Year in 1995, replaces Mike Davis, who announced last month he was resigning. Davis went 115-79 in six seasons as head coach, was the first Indiana coach to win 20 games in each of his first three seasons and led the Hoosiers to the national championship game in 2002, two seasons after Bob Knight was fired.

At first glance, this is a strange move for Sampson, who has built Oklahoma into a top basketball program. The NCAA is still investigating OU’s recruiting practices, so maybe there’s more to the move than meets the eye. Sampson will bring a little more toughness to Indiana program and his teams’ physical style is probably a good fit for the Big Ten.

The most enjoyable part of writing my 2005 preview for BE was the response from you, gentle readers. The mail that I received on that piece was well worth the hours that I put into it. Some people sent me detailed, Bill James-style stat projections, while others just said that I “suuuuuuuuuck.� That last person was a Washington Nationals fan…at the All Star break, when they were still in first place. We all know who got the last laugh on that one.

So I’m poring over the projected lineups and pitching depth charts for all the teams, and the only thing I can think is, Man, did a lot of players switch teams. Matt Morris is a Giant, Fatty Ponson is a Cardinal, Carlos Delgado is a Met and Josh Beckett is a Red Sock. Some things, though, stay the same: Kerry Wood is already on the disabled list, and George Steinbrenner is overpaying for pitching ($18 million for Kyle Farnsworth? You got served, sucker).

Once again, I attempt the impossible and list my projections for each division, which will surely look ridiculous at the All Star break, and absurd by season’s end.

National League East
1) New York Mets
Theme Song: “At Last,� Etta James
And thus, their season is already jinxed before it’s even begun, by the very notion that I am expecting them to win the East. My stepbrother, a dyed-in-the-wool Mutts fan, will surely kill me. But I can’t help it, that lineup kills, bro. Reyes and LoDuca are at the top, followed by a murderer’s row of Beltran, Delgado, Wright and Floyd. These guys are going to score tons of runs, and while their pitching is still lacking, it’s good enough to keep them in the game (look for Aaron Heilman to break out big time if the Mets give him a shot in the rotation), and putting Billy Wagner in the closer spot in place of the piñata that closed for them last year (Braden Looper, who’s now in St. Louis) is a big boost. Of course, the Mets being the Mets, this could all go horribly wrong; Pedro’s got a bad toe, and Delgado has a sore something or other. But at the moment, the planets seem to be aligned. Even John Smoltz thinks the Mets are going to win the East this year.

2) Philadelphia Phillies
Theme Song: “Long Shot,� Aimee Mann
I took a long look at Atlanta for this spot – after all, I did say last year that until someone knocks them out of the top spot, you have to go with them as the favorites – but it ends here. Like the Mets, Philadelphia has two great table setters at the top of the order in Rollins and Rowand (whom they got from the White Sox in the improbable trade of Jim Thome), and any one of the following four hitters (Abreu, Utley, Burrell, Howard) can go yard seemingly at will. Abreu’s colossal fall-off after the All Star Game was disturbing, but he’s still a perennial 30-30 threat, while Utley is the next Jeff Kent, though hopefully with much less jackassity. On the surface, the starting rotation would concern me, since Cory Lidle and Ryan Franklin are big time Stifley Stiffersons, but if the Phils are smart, they will take two of the three guys fighting for the fifth spot in the rotation, Ryan Madson and Robinson Tejeda, and give them each their own slot, hopefully kicking Franklin to the curb. If that happens, they could cause all kinds of trouble. One question, though: why is management so eager to get rid of Abreu? He was part of every trade rumor out of Philly this offseason.

To read the rest of the preview, click here. And don’t forget to come back to Scores Report to sound off on your picks to win it all.

I was reading the baseball news today and began to smile when I read that Major League Baseball sponsors are going to boycott Barry Bond’s new records this year. In my opinion, Barry Bonds is guiltier of using steroids than most active players today. He has been avoiding the controversy and letting everyone else take the fall. The amount of growth and power in his body is unprecedented.

Baseball’s image as a whole was taking a dive because Barry continued to break records and avoid investigations. It’s a sad day in baseball when the companies that sponsor the game show more integrity than the game itself. Barry Bonds should retire and take all of his “tainted� records with him.

Phil Savage, the excellent GM of the Cleveland Browns, can speak candidly about Vince Young since the Browns are not in the market for a quarterback in the first round. Savage sums up nicely the concerns about Young’s ability to transition from the college game to the NFL game:

Savage raised some serious questions about Young’s ability to transfer his running and throwing ability to the NFL.

“I think the question on him, at least in my mind, is the fact he has operated in a shotgun offense with pretty vanilla reads, and if those reads weren’t there, he could take off and run with it,” he said. “You could do that in the NFL to a degree, but there does seem to be a little bit more structure in the league than in the college game.

“I think you would have to adjust your system, and if he came on your team you’d have to have two different offenses in a way, and I’m not sure you have time to prepare all of that. You have to be really convinced that’s what you want to do.”

He’s right on the money.

The trade that brought former #1 pick Kwame Brown to the Lakers wasn’t looking too good for most of the season. In the 42 games before the All-Star break, Brown averaged just 6.1 ppg and 6.0 rpg on 47.4% shooting in 26 minutes. Over the last four games – not coincidentally, all Laker wins – he averaged 16.3 ppg and 9.0 rpg on 72.2% shooting in 38 minutes per game. Sure, it’s only four games, but Laker fans will take any possible sign that the big kid is finally coming of age.

“He’s been doing the defensive part all year long,” Kobe Bryant said Wednesday night following one of the best efforts of Brown’s five-year NBA career. “Sometimes, the people want more. Tonight he gave them more.”

“Great game. We told him before the game, they don’t bother to guard him, that if he was active, he was going to find some things around there,” Lakers coach Phil Jackson said. “He really did. He found some opportunities tonight.

“He’s steadily been playing better and better as he’s gotten comfortable.”

“I have come in here and done what Coach has asked me to do,” Brown said. “He asked me to run, rebound and defend, but unfortunately playing defense is like being a lineman in football — you just don’t get much credit for it.

“With Chris (Mihm) being out, I did not want there to be a letdown for my teammates. I know my role has changed a little bit because I have to go in and score instead of coming off the bench to get Kobe open, run and rebound. I have to do a little more on the offensive end.”

At 6’11″ and 270 lbs., Brown has all the physical tools to be a superstar, but he’s never been able to reach his potential. He has the type of game that makes most college basketball players cringe, especially those who never get the chance to play professionally.

The key to his recent play may be the extra minutes he’s getting with Mihm out. It seems like, with Phil Jackson as your coach, either the light goes on or the team gets rid of you. Maybe Kwame’s light is finally going on.