I landed in Miami after an extensive trip (12+ hours) and the weather is awesome. I’m here for the 2008 NBA Marketing Meetings. All the team gather with the league to share best practices about marketing basketball. I went last year to New Orleans and it was pretty cool…

This year, we started with a formal meeting where all the teams representatives hung in their own little groups and talked amongst themselves. It was cool cause in our little huddle was Greg. As in Greg Oden. He came down to be on a panel with some of the all time greats (Dr. J, Bill Walton) more on that to come. Also in the crowd was Amhad Rashad (go DUCKS).

I was introduced to Bill Walton. He’s just as tall in person as you expect, and is extremely cool. Seriously, he looked me in the face and said, what you guys have in Portland is great. We had something special in 1977 and what is going on now is amazing.

The Trail Blazers group gathered into cabs and headed to South Beach where we had an AMAZING dinner at WISH. Todd Oldham did the design… cool, you know it. Then headed to Mangos. Crazy good looking Puertoricans were dancing on the the bar. It was a good time by our group, some hung longer than others, but all in all, it was a good night for the first night of the meetings.

You might be asking yourself,  what the hell goes on there? Well, we’ll do a lot of different seminars in our own respective field. I will be going to Database Marketing, Marketing, Ticket Sales and Retention. Ther are community outreach, player development, public relations and other seminars that go on. I think these meetings hold a lot of water when it comes to brainstorming and furthering ideas for the teams and the league.

One topic will be one that is close to home, social networks. We don’t have the solution for social networking, but no one does. That is the beauty. Do we have the best website out there. No. But no one does. Seriously. Everyone should improve their sites and their interaction… and that is why we are here to discuss and refine. In addition to talking through what these sites can be, we are relaunching our social network, to strive for more. To strive for better. Fans deserve it. Our team deserves it. The internet deserves it. That sounds boisterous, or extremist, but you need to push to do better. Seriously.

I will try to twitter during the meetings… and maybe blog. I know, they’ve been rare. But I will make an effort.

Oh yeah, my little boy (Jack) is getting all growns up. Check out “Jack Lives Here”. He’s started to pull himself up. Crap, that means he’s about to walk.

Here’s a ticket deal for all who come to my blog (as a little thank you)… Get 50% off tickets for the Clippers game (this Saturday 3/31) and the Sonics game (4/14). The yellow seats are pretty good for $25.

Click here to get your ticket deal… now you can’t say I never gave you nothin’.

Ok, this is “bar none” my favorite time of year for sports. There are people who love every Saturday and Sunday during fall for Football (ehem, my wife). I do love college football. I love the NFL and all the stress fantasy football brings me. But these next three weeks pumps adrenaline into my system constantly. I just watched Virgina Commonwealth beat Duke. I would never… repeat NEVER watch a Virgina Commonwealth football game.

I am a fan of Colin Cowherd, I remember the days at Entercom, early in the mornings seeing Colin wander the halls during a commercial break with his paper coffee cup asking people if they thought waffles were better than pancakes. Recently on his national radio show on ESPN Radio, he brought up the fact that college football wouldn’t benefit from a tournament like college basketball. His argument is a valid one. The tourney makes the regular season in college basketball virtually obsolete. The only time of the year people care about it is during March. Where as college football gets great ratings throughout their regular season.

Where I disagree with him is it isn’t the tournament that makes the regular season obsolete, it’s the amount of games that makes the regular season obsolete. Most teams first 10 games are against non factor opponents and don’t really garner any attention. In college football every game counts towards your quest to the national title or at least a bowl game.

What I like about the tournament situation is, the amount of teams that COULD be in the final four is larger. Of course, at the beginning of every sehttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifason, college football teams could say the same thing (Virgina Commonwealth maybe has a shot at the national title game for football if they win every game). But that isn’t the case due to the voting system. Boise State went undefeated, but didn’t a shot at the national title shot due to rankings from pollsters.

Do I have a solution. No way. I know that I love this time of year! And will be checking my two bracket entries every 10 minutes. Here are my two entries in case you want to heckle me for picking bad picks. The Brown Shark || The Moldy Hair Clog.

A blog post about March Madness would be complete without some sort of “waste of work time” reference. So here ya go. Also, mind you, I’ve talked to people at work during march madness that I rarely talk to normally. There is something to be said about building camaraderie.

Yes, a lot is going on. Launching social network (we’re at half our goal for fan sign-ups in 10 days), a win streak (2 games, trying to make it 3 tonight, does that constitute a streak?), a trade (former Duck Freddie Jones for Juan Dixon) and the normal game stuff we have going on… it’s Friday and time for Portland Coffee.

Stephen Landau started this up here in Portland (I understand Russell Davies gave Stephen the idea to start this up)…
Stephen usually hosts, myself and Shannon will be hosting this week, as Stephen will be at the traveling with his family. We’ll be at Tiny’s from 8:30am until whenever really. I usually have to bail due to a weekly meeting at 9:30am, but people mingle, debate, inspire and get cracked out on Tiny’s Coffee.
Hope to see you guys at this coffee or a future one. Fridays, 8:30am.