Person of Interest: Rasheed Wallace

Portland’s close and troubled relationship with marijuana made things even more difficult for the man whom Peter Vecsey unrelentingly referred to as “Rashweed.” The city has long since been associated with pot-smoking hippies, a fact not particularly embraced by its more conservative, wealthy base. “A lot of the season-ticket holders try to create a divide between themselves and the town’s pot smokers,” Golliver explained. “When the players are conforming to ‘hippie patterns,’ those season-ticket holders will react more violently. Honestly, if weed wasn’t such a polarizing issue here in Portland, I don’t think Rasheed would’ve gotten it as bad.”

Of course, nearly all of this would have been forgiven if Rasheed, who scored 30 points in that fateful Game 7, but who contributed six of the team’s 13 straight missed shots down the stretch, had been able to carry the Blazers to the NBA Finals. But the Blazers never achieved their expected level of success, and fans and media members who were looking for an easy scapegoat focused on Wallace and how everything that didn’t make him the prototypical, model athlete doubled as a reason for his team’s failures.

Rasheed played three more years with the Blazers. Those teams won 50, 49, and 50 games, but each lost in the first round of the playoffs. When he was finally traded to the Hawks for a game and then to the Pistons, Portland’s patience with their talented power forward and his supporting cast had run its course. “The city’s perception of a kid from inner-city Philly came from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” Golliver said. “We thought we could mold him. The reality, of course, was that Rasheed Wallace wasn’t Will Smith.”

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