Well, boys, there's Trouble.

	Perdue

	Wallace

	Wells

	Kemp

Right here in Rose City.

With a capital T and that rhymes with B and that stands for Blazers.

They're a mess. Don't let the plus-.500 record fool you. They've got big problems.

Saw it myself the other night, when the Blazers got chumped on their home floor by the Sixers, a team with nine healthy bodies (eight really, considering Aaron McKie was playing a couple of days after suffering a concussion) but one big heart. Philly made all the big, smart plays, leaving Portland with the small, dumb plays.

Exhibit A: Bonzi Wells steals the ball from McKie early in the fourth quarter, with Portland down 96-79. Greg Anthony, his teammate, is about five yards ahead of both he and McKie, with a breakaway layup for the taking if Wells will just throw him the ball. Instead, Wells drives to the hoop, gets fouled by McKie and makes just one of two free throws.

Selfish.

It's not just Wells. It's everyone. From Shawn Kemp, who's more bloated now than he was at the start of training camp, to Rasheed Wallace, who's game is at an all-star level but who's still proving to be too immature with the refs (11 technical fouls through Monday) to be a dependable go-to guy. It's Arvydas Sabonis' left knee sprain, which has limited him to nine of the team's first 22 games. It's Anthony's slow recovery from two ankle surgeries in the offseason.

"The only consistent thing about this team," veteran center Will Perdue says, "is its inconsistency."

	Sabonis has struggled with knee problems, and it shows on the front line.

Without Sabonis on the floor, Portland's halfcourt offense is clogged up. There's no reason for opposing centers to move out and guard Kemp or Dale Davis, neither of whom is shooting anywhere close to Sabonis' .505 mark last season. With the middle blocked, neither Steve Smith or Scottie Pippen gets those open slices to the hoop. Naturally, the players are complaining about Mike Dunleavy's offense. Equally naturally -- but correctly -- he points to the team's decided defensive dropoff.

"We're not as good defensively right now," Dunleavy says. "Just look at the numbers. Our field goal percentage allowed is not as strong. Part of that is that defensively, we've had some injuries. Obviously Sabas being out of the lineup a lot, he's one of the best defensive rebounders in the league. I don't think Greg is back to where he was defensively, putting ball pressure on people. Hopefully, he'll get to it."

Is it possible, I wondered, that Pippen might have slipped a little at that end, too?

"Hard to say," Dunleavy said. "As an individual defender, every year, I think you've got to give him a little bit of leeway as far as the age factor coming in. And as far as coming in and being a total stopper on somebody. But he's still a great defender."

"We don't play well together," says Perdue, and he was on three Bulls' title teams, so he knows from dysfunction. "We look like a bunch of individuals out there playing in our own game. Sometimes you watch a particular player, or we come out of a timeout and we draw up a play, and it seems like we can't transfer from what we saw 30 seconds ago on the floor, and we totally screw it up. That's the basic fundamentals of basketball. We talk about screens, blocking out, executing on offense. The one thing I'll say we're not too good at yet is in Chicago and San Antonio, if things weren't going well on the offensive end, guys really picked it up defensively. That's how we kept ourselves in the game."

Kemp could help at both ends, but he's, once again, way, way out of shape. He's not helping himself in the locker room, where teammates aren't exactly leaping to his defense. "When you're the man, like he was in Cleveland, you can play 40 minutes a night and get yourself in shape," a teammate says. "Here, you're only gonna get seven or eight shots at a time, and you better make them when you're out there."

I asked Pippen how bad the team's chemistry was.

"We lost Brian Grant, who was probably one of the best role players in the game," he said. "We lost Jermaine (O'Neal traded to Indiana for Davis), who was pretty much a bench player who could accept his role and some nights not play. To now, bringing in two players, and now you've got to scoot everybody over on the bench for. It's shaken our chemistry up a little bit. And plus, you're already dealing with a team that tries to play a lot of guys. It makes the game tough. It makes it tough when you turn and play a lot of guys and you're trying to build momentum and guys try to get a rhythm or try to find a flow. Some nights, guys press a little bit, because they know they've got to make something happen or they're going to come out."

That sounds, I continued, like something young players on a young team would do. Not a veteran bunch one quarter from the Finals six months ago.

"It's not a young team," he allowed. "I just think we don't have that luxury of having guys just stepping up every night and playing real well for us. We're sort of a wild card team every night, in terms of finding somebody to get us going. It's very tough some nights, because the way that our rotation is some times, it's kind of hard to get into the flow. Them nights, we kind of struggle. If Rasheed doesn't have it going, it makes it tough on us."

Now, there's every chance that the Blazers will rip off 10 or 11 in a row, and life will be back to normal. But some in the locker room wonder if Portland has yet to get over its fourth-quarter choke in Game 7 in Los Angeles. And I suspect that with every mediocre performance, every sleepwalker of an evening, it will get harder and harder for Dunleavy to keep a lid on things.

"One of the guys came up to me," Perdue said, "and he said, 'I haven't been in the league as long as you have, but this is not good. For the coaches and the players.' And when you get yourself into a situation like that, whether it's the coach's fault or the players' fault, who's the first to go?"

Ilgauskas in the house
I'm thinking that Bernard King was the last guy who's missed as much time over a two-year period as Cleveland's Zydrunas Ilgauskas, and come back to be a star. Ilgauskas has played in every game so far this season as he comes back from multiple foot surgeries that limited him to five games total over the previous two seasons. "I'm not 100 percent near where I want to be, and that has nothing to do with the foot," he says. "My foot feels good, but being out for two years, there's certain things that you lose, and to gain them back takes a long time."

	ALDRIDGE'S RANKINGS
	THE TOP 10 1. Utah 2. Sacramento 3. L.A. Lakers 4. Philadelphia 5. Portland 6. San Antonio 7. Phoenix 8. Dallas 9. New York 10. Minnesota THE BOTTOM FIVE 25. Golden State 26. L.A. Clippers 27. Atlanta 28. Washington 29. Chicago

The Cavs are doing surprisingly well in the Central because they've gotten rid of Kemp and his maddening ways, and because Clarence Weatherspoon and Chris Gatling have bought into Randy Wittman's system after initially refusing to report to camp, and because Andre Miller is becoming a big-time point guard (I know I said he's the next John Stockton a couple of weeks ago; now I'm thinking he's more like Mo Cheeks). But the biggest reason they're playing better is the 7-3 Ilgauskas is back on the floor.

"Last year when I was here, we didn't have that true center in the middle," says forward Lamond Murray. "We didn't have Z, and guys would drive to the basket and we'd be looking for somebody to distract the shot or block a shot and there was nobody there."

So far, Ilgauskas is posting modest numbers (10.2 points, 6.4 boards). But he's out there every night, and that's his biggest accomplishment.

"I knew it wasn't a career ending injury because it was just a bone in the foot," Ilgauskas says. "The frustrating part was that it wasn't healing and last year I tried to come back and it was still painful. But I also realized that I was only 24 years old. I mean if I was 35, then yes, I'm probably thinking, maybe it's time (to retire), but I'm only 24 years old, so I feel like I can still play at least 10 years in this league. So this year I just took my time, got healthy and hopefully it's gonna work out this year."

Around The League