Trail Blazers edge out Game 2 road win against the San Antonio Spurs, 106-103<\/a><\/p>\nOwner Troy Douglass says tracking down the ball was a mission years in the making. <\/p>\n
\u201cBetween 1991 to 1998, it’s just something that’s really special, especially for its Blazer fans,\u201d Douglass said.<\/p>\n
He eventually came across the piece in an unexpected place: Facebook Marketplace. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a listing that said \u2018Just Listed,\u2019 and I’m always looking for Blazer stuff, just scouring for my own interest and also for the store,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I seen it, and I messaged the guy, and he said it was available. I called up my dad because he’s got a big old construction van, and I figured that if my dad could do it, we could get it today — and so we got it the same day.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Douglass, bringing the ball home feels personal. <\/p>\n
\u201cI’m a huge Blazer fan and having this kind of — just feels like a lot of joy for me personally,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I think for people to see it again, that’s the biggest thing. Especially that we have a store that is very basketball centric; it’s very Blazer centric.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Douglass says the ball will be installed atop the store on Wednesday, April 22 at 10 a.m. — lifted into place with a crane just in time to energize fans ahead of the big game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ahead of Game 3 on Friday at the Moda Center, the popular basketball store \u201cBack to the Basket\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":715729,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3784],"tags":[7,601,6,687,471,3967,1617],"class_list":{"0":"post-715728","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-portland-trail-blazers","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-blazers","10":"tag-nba","11":"tag-portland","12":"tag-portland-trail-blazers","13":"tag-portlandtrailblazers","14":"tag-trail-blazers"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116447533021144856","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=715728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715728\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/715729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=715728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=715728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=715728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}