How Much Will The City of Portland Love Andre Miller?

We know that the signing of Andre Miller makes plenty of sense basketball wise. Now let us speculate where the Blazers new point guard will land on the How Much The City of Portland Loves You Recent Blazers Scale. (Or HMCPLYRBS. For short. Incorporating all players in Blazers history is impossible since a scale accurately showing the gap of love between Terry Porter and Zach Randolph could not be contained in the known Universe.)

First, a brief overview of the scale, which was developed by your's truly in 13 minutes using MSPaint. (What? This ain't BustABucket.) At the top you see new Phoenix Sun Channing Frye, who basically is Portland.

Next we see Roybot. Great player, decent man. His greatness and decentness make him easily loveable, but he just isn't going to start a blog or talk about how much he loves eating at the Tin Shed.

At the next mark down we have Rudy. Fernandez was once in Channing Frye-territory but has came down a bit after speculation of his unhappiness with the team this summer.

The next notch consists of your Steve Blakes and Joel Przybillas. (Yes, I know there is only actually one of each of those people.) These guys are good enough to positively impact winning, but not quite good enough to lose the "scrappy" tag. Plus they are Caucasian and "work really hard," always good for bonus points in the White People's Atlanta.

From there on we see the players that will have as many detractors as supporters, which of course need to be represented by Travis Outlaw.

If we keep this scale only to the current roster it is important to note that there is no level that is not mostly puppies and sunshine. Just to make the love seem more valuable, I added some unlove in the form of Big Pun:


So where will Andre Miller fall? We consider the elements that will influence his spot with the City of Portland:

Boosters:

- Went to Obama's inauguration

- Will improve team

- Sometimes described as "eccentric"

Sinkers:

- Didn't actually vote for Obama. Loves Orrin Hatch, actually.

- Will reduce Steve Blake's role

- Is from Los Angeles

Where do we put this man? I'm projecting Miller's "Will improve team" factor will be strong enough to keep him well North of the Blake/Billa/I, Robot level. In the end winning probably decides about 90% of a players location on the scale. (The "Jailblazers" sold a lot of tickets before it all fell down.)

All that is left at this point is to offer an official "Welcome to Portland Andre!" If you are the piece that takes the team to a new level you may even end up being one of the "Lifers," Blazers that received so much love they stayed in Portland even after retirement.