(They Know They Got) Skillz: The 1999-00 Blazers

When Gerald Wallace was traded from Charlotte to Portland in February, the possibility of Nate McMillan allowing him to wear his trademarked headband caused nearly as much debate and discussion in the local media and on fan forums as his considerable on-court potential for the Blazers. Seeing as how seemingly meaningless topics like this come up all the time in the sports blogosphere, it’s tempting to write this one off as just another distraction. But there’s a reason McMillan breaking the headband embargo for Wallace  was a big deal. In 2000, Portland’s last title-contending season to date, several players felt so strongly about headbands that they were compelled to record a rap song about them.

[flash http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te_gU5kgU1E]

The single “Can I Get a Headband” was released in April of 2000, just in time for the playoff run. The song, and its B-side, “It Ain’t Easy,” featured rapping from three of the most popular players on the team: Damon Stoudamire, Bonzi Wells, and Brian Grant. The single release was a benefit for the Boys & Girls Club, and also served as a brilliant marketing ploy on the part of the team—if you were at the game and weren’t rocking a black, white, or red headband, your fandom might have to be called into question. The fact that the Blazers won 59 games that season and seemed on the verge of an improbable comeback from a 3-1 deficit against the Lakers in the Western Conference Finals didn’t exactly hurt the song’s ability to take off that spring, either. The headband became synonymous with this team pretty quickly. Black, white, or red, just put it on your head.

Personal nostalgia aside, “Can I Get a Headband” is pretty terrible. The production has more in common with “Hip-Hop Hooray” than anything close to contemporary. The players don’t really do much rapping outside of the song’s hook (“Can I get a headband/one for my peeps/one for the fans in the really cheap seats/one for my mama, one for the mayor”). Most of the vocal work is done by one Tracy Harris, who sings of a twisted fantasy world in which not only do homeless people panhandle for headbands, but they are accepted currency for church tithing.

Far more useful is the less-discussed “It Ain’t Easy,” which serves as a refresher course on some of the less enduring names on that team (Stacey Augmon, Gary Grant) and seems to suggest hot-dog vendor as a fallback career option for Rasheed Wallace. If Twitter existed in 2000, that part of the song would have kicked off the #nbalockoutjobs meme. It loses points only for neglecting to mention Detlef Schrempf, which I’m sure Aziz Ansari would agree is pretty indefensible.

Sadly, the Blazers’ headband-wearing utopia wasn’t meant to last. As Bob Whitsitt slowly traded the team’s most popular players for aging former stars like Shawn Kemp and Rod Strickland and increasingly began drafting unpolished high-schoolers, the culture of the team changed. People forget it now, but the “Jail Blazers” nickname was there for a reason. By about 2004, it was no longer news when a Blazer got arrested for something—rather, it would be shocking if two weeks went by without a player making the wrong kind of headlines off the court. Whitsitt left in 2003 and was replaced as general manager by John Nash, who talked a good game about improving the team’s image but didn’t do much to back it up. When Nate McMillan was hired as head coach in 2005, however, he took that task seriously. And for the man nicknamed the “Drill Sergeant” for his no-nonsense approach to coaching, part of shaking the bad-boy image meant banning things that could be deemed unprofessional. Like headbands.

Fast-forward six years: however much the Blazers are hampered on the court by injuries year after year, they are currently one of the most culturally sound teams in the league. Brandon Roy coming to terms publicly with his decrepit knees and diminished role qualifies as a legitimate controversy these days. Hell, Roy appearing in the same rap video (and not even in the same scene) as marijuana is something he feels compelled to explain. When the Blazers made one of the most widely acclaimed trades of this past deadline and acquired Gerald Wallace, McMillan wisely came to the conclusion that the culture around the team was stable enough that if his high-priced new forward felt more comfortable playing in a headband, that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. And something tells me that if other players on the team were to follow suit, Nate would probably be okay with that too. In fact, if Wallace were so inclined as to record “Can I Get a Headband, Pt. 2,” don’t entirely rule out a McMillan guest verse. Black, white, or red, just put it on your head.