The Official Site of Brandon Roy

Fri, Oct 31st 2008, 06:50

For Aldridge and Roy, a new dynamic

Jason Quick- The Oregonian Staff

In the Trail Blazers locker room, there’s roughly eight long strides between the lockers of Brandon Roy and LaMarcus Aldridge.

During their first two years with the Blazers, that distance might as well been have eight miles.

“I don’t feel we really knew each other,” Roy said. “And I don’t feel like we went that extra step to try and get to know each other.”

Added Aldridge: “We would talk to each other, but we never did anything above and beyond that.”

On a team last season that became very close through group dinners, movie excursions, and pile-in cab rides, the team’s two stars had a definite, yet unspoken, distance between them.

They both considered the other a good teammate and in casual terms, a friend. But when they talked, it was, as Roy put it, “about business.”

By no means did they dislike each other. But as each departed Portland and headed their separate ways for the summer — Roy to Seattle and Aldridge to Dallas — they knew their relationship wasn’t right. And they knew that as pillars of the franchise, that relationship had to change if the Blazers were to live up to the buzz as a team on the rise.

It was an uncomfortable feeling for both, for how does one broach something that is so tacit, so vague, yet so real?

As it turns out, it happened naturally. It started with a heart-to-heart talk in September, when the two were holed up in a trailer for 10 hours in Los Angeles. Along the way, there was a symbolic dinner in Kansas City, Mo., and an important assist from teammate Travis Outlaw.

As a result, Roy and Aldridge have become more than just teammates. They have finally become friends. Real friends.

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