When the Blazers entered the 2009 offseason, they had cap room and a wealth of young talent available to consolidate into one more full-fledged star to add to the core of Brandon Roy, Greg Oden and LaMarcus Aldridge.

We're talking the 'world and oyster' days of Portland.

The manner in which things quickly unraveled for the Blazers, between devastating injuries to Oden, gradual deterioration of knees to Roy and the long and much-publicized ousting of general manager Kevin Pritchard, has been well-documented.

The expiring contract of Raef LaFrentz was not used at the 2009 Trade Deadline and after being shut out of their pursuit of Hedo Turkoglu and Utah's decision to match their offer sheet to Paul Millsap, they finally settled on Andre Miller.

Strikingly, the Blazers became an extremely old team overnight.

The average age of Portland's top-nine players on Opening Night 2008 was 23.5.

Two seasons later on October 26th, 2010 against the Suns, the Blazers had an average Opening Night age of 27 for their top-nine players.

While the carryovers of Roy, Aldridge, Nicolas Batum and Joel Przybilla had in fact aged two years, Oden became Marcus Camby and Jerryd Bayless became Andre Miller.

The Portland core was supposed to go through a maturation process together and eventually peak (likely in 10-11) together to compete for appearances in the Finals.

The 54-28 record put up in 08-09 by that 23.5-year-old core was supposed to be the opening salvo instead of the end's beginning.