SALT LAKE CITY – The disbelief and distrust had grown so deep a season ago, Utah Jazz general manager Kevin O'Connor had gone to Carlos Boozer with a proposal that franchises seldom ask of athletes. He wanted to release MRI results to the media to provide public proof that Boozer's hamstring hadn't been a phantom injury.

Yes, this was an unorthodox move, but as nasty as it had become for the front office and Boozer, O'Connor resolved to make a case for his $68 million investment.

"Kevin," Boozer remembered telling him, "you can tell them to go to hell."

Well, that was one strategy, but O'Connor deferred to a different diplomacy. He flanked himself with the team orthopedist, Dr. Lyle Mason, and distributed the X-rays to the assembled media to, he said, "show them where he had torn it, where the blood was."

Even now, Boozer bristles, "I never cared what people thought. As long as I know what's going on, and my teammates (do), I could care less what other people think. At that time, Kevin

Twenty-four hours had yet to pass on the draft lottery transformation of the Portland Trail Blazers, and general manager Kevin Pritchard and his staff already had brainstormed a most intriguing idea: If they're going to draft Greg Oden, they should take a hard look at making a trade to get Mike Conley Jr. to come with him.

So the discussion is under way, a source close to the team and Oden said Wednesday night, about trading into the top of the lottery for a second draft pick to secure the franchise center's personal point guard. It would be a brilliant, bold stroke for the Blazers G.M., and here's the thing: Pritchard has the parts and the imagination to make it happen.

He's on a professional roll, what with drafting LaMarcus Aldridge and trading for rookie of the year Brandon Roy. And now, against all odds, he won the No. 1 pick in the June 28 draft.

Does Pritchard have enough with Zach Randolph, a 20-and-10 low post scorer and rebounder, and Jarrett Jack, a competent point guard, as

SECAUCUS, N.J. – Between the commissioner telling Greg Oden and Kevin Durant that they had to go to college for a year and the Florida Gators' three stars staying one more season, an intriguing confluence of events inspired one of the deepest, most talented NBA draft classes in years.

And now, with the draft lottery complete Tuesday night, here's a scenario about how the lottery could play out June 28 in New York.

1. Portland Trail Blazers – Greg Oden, 7-foot center, Ohio State. With the first pick in the 2007 NBA draft, the Blazers select … Sam Bowie, Mychal Thompson and LaRue Martin. Nah, not this time. The Blazers are getting a franchise center for the next decade.

2. Seattle SuperSonics – Kevin Durant, 6-9 forward, Texas. This is some spectacular consolation prize. Durant is the most gifted and complete offensive player to come out of college in years, and maybe, just maybe, he can save the Sonics in Seattle.

3. Atlanta Hawks – Yi Jianlian, 7-foot forward, China. Two years ago, the

SECAUCUS, N.J. – Just in the past week, Portland Trail Blazers general manager Kevin Pritchard had been sitting with his scouting staff and coaches in the team's offices. They were throwing out names on top of the draft board, probing the impossibilities of a draft-night choice of Greg Oden and Kevin Durant. They went back and forth until Pritchard left them with these wistful words, "Wouldn't it be great to have the debate?"

Now, Pritchard was standing on the sound stage of the NBA Entertainment Studios. He had just hugged Brandon Roy, the Blazers' representative at Tuesday night's draft lottery, and his cell phone was buzzing relentlessly in his pocket. He stopped for a second and smiled, his eyes downright dizzy.

"Stunned," he said breathing out.

For the first time since the NBA moved to the weighted draft lottery system in 1993, the worst three teams – Memphis, Boston and Milwaukee – dropped out of the top three spots. Portland won the lottery despite a 5.3-percent chance of

SAN ANTONIO – As Jerry Sloan watched his players drop deeper and deeper into disarray in Game 1, it wasn't the scoreboard that troubled the coach as much as his Utah Jazz's conduct on the court. They would make a mistake and one would snap on another, roll eyes, scrunch a face, and the suggestion was unmistakable to him.

Everyone was passing the blame, refusing consequences for the corrosive basketball to start Sunday.

Across the past decade in the NBA, coaches have tired of telling teams this, but Sloan needed to do it again in the opener of the Western Conference finals.

Hey knuckleheads, watch Tim Duncan, will you?

"They (threw) a pass over his head, and he took responsibility for it," Sloan said of Duncan and his San Antonio Spurs teammates. "And our players wanted to make the fault for somebody else."

Duncan is playing the best basketball of his life again, and yes, of course, here we go again, America groans. The Big Fundamental. Blah, blah, blah. Beginning with Duncan's peerless

SAN ANTONIO – The season hadn't been over an hour, and Steve Nash had turned the Game 6 eulogy into one more alibi on accountability. As it looks, this promises to be the sad song of the Phoenix Suns' summer, an insistence that something in this San Antonio Spurs series, this season, was left unanswered, that maybe the Suns are allowed to believe that the best team goes home now.

"We'll never know," Nash said late Friday night. He had been asked if he leaves these Western Conference semifinals believing there was nothing to do to close the gap on San Antonio, because it had been done despite losing in six games, despite the truth-telling of the scoreboard.

"Part of me as a sportsman wants to give them credit but I don't know what the outcome could have been if we went home tied with a full team. … If we had our guys."

Finally, Nash said, "This will forever haunt us."

This will forever haunt the Suns until they lose to the Spurs again next year. Because if they go into the offseason

PHOENIX – Out of a broken home, Amare Stoudemire had been one of those raw recruits who reached mythical lore in his high school days, raising suspicions of his staying power with transfers upon transfers. Everyone was fast to label him as a problematic prep star spit out of the system.

Four years ago, the rest of the NBA feared it would be drafting a head case, but then-general manager Bryan Colangelo of the Phoenix Suns had been granted a private workout, done his research on the kid and made him the biggest draft day steal of the past decade.

Stoudemire has come back from a devastating knee fracture to become a first-time All-NBA player this season, and now, he makes one more dramatic return to the basketball season in Game 6 of the Western Conference semifinals against the San Antonio Spurs.

He hasn't gotten good and loud, like everyone else, about injustices done to him in this series. When everyone else was ripping David Stern and Stu Jackson, Stoudemire watched the video of

PHOENIX – The San Antonio Spurs had been greeted with a surround sound of loathe, with "Dirty as Dirt" signs and "Stu Bleeps" T-shirts selling on the street corners. Sports talk radio sounded like a gathering of scorned school children, decrying the suspensions to Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw as the gravest of social injustices. One station was even reading the NBA's telephone number in New York over the air, as though they were going to harass David Stern instead of some poor switchboard operator.

There was the Spurs' Brent Barry standing stunned in warmups, watching an old lady flip him the middle finger and, later, an old man telling him that he had no class.

"But you don't even know me," Barry pleaded with him.

Oh, these Phoenix Suns fans think they know the Spurs too well, and no matter what they do, they still can't beat San Antonio when it matters most.

When this 88-85 loss in Game 5 was over, Raja Bell, the Suns' best defender, shrugged his shoulders and insisted that