Ben Golliver interviews Andrew Wiggins

Ben Golliver interviews then-youth star Andrew Wiggins at the Portland Trail Blazers practice facility in Tualatin. Golliver left Blazer's Edge this summer for a full-time position with Sports Illustrated (photo courtesy of Nick Taylor, taken for Blazer's Edge).

Dave Deckard is a Lutheran pastor in rural Idaho by day, but for eight years he's preached the gospel of Portland Trail Blazers basketball by night.

The 45-year-old managing editor of Blazer's Edge took over the fan-run website as a hobby at first, but it's evolved into a second job.

Deckard, a Portland native, doesn't go to many games. But throughout the past nine years, Blazer's Edge built an active and dedicated readership on the back of a deluge of daily content on all things Blazers —roster breakdowns, trade rumors, links to mainstream media coverage and game recaps.

Started on a lark by current Trail Blazers digital reporter Casey Holdahl in 2005, Blazer's Edge emerged from an era when sports blogs were both ubiquitous and short-lived.

"For a while there you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a Blazers blogger," Deckard said recently, "But Blazer's Edge remains unique." Deckard said the success is all about platform, philosophy, talent and above all the community of Blazer fans that populate the site.

Today, Blazer's Edge is part of SB Nation's network of blogs and the site is fast-approaching its 10th anniversary.

For much of that time, the website was a tag-team operation with Deckard and Portland-based writer Ben Golliver running the show. Deckard served as the spiritual guide of the fanatical base of readers and Blazers devotees and Golliver was the on-the-ground voice in Portland.

As the Blazers enter another new season, fresh off an optimism-building campaign that included the team's first playoff series win in 14 years, Blazer's Edge is entering a new era, too.

Golliver is gone, and Blazers officials said while the team was an early adopter to granting access to fan-run websites, that access is now more restricted in some respects.

Locker room access for fan-run websites like Blazer's Edge is gone, too, and will be evaluated on a situational basis. Access to cover a team practice is available on a requested basis also. "You lose an experienced hand," Michael Lewellen, Blazers VP of Corporate Communications said, "Sometimes you find yourself starting over a little bit."

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In 2005, Holdahl worked at a community college in Salem but wanted to write in his free time. So the then 25-year-old did what many fellow millennials were doing: start a free Blogspot account.

Today, Holdahl described the early incarnation of what would become Blazer's Edge as "bad writing done sarcastically."

At the time, the Blazers were at rock bottom. They sported the league's worst record during the 2005-2006 season. Fan interest was waning and the roster included forgettable players like Ruben Patterson, Darius Miles and Sebastian Telfair that never connected with the fan base.

Dave Deckard is one of the longest tenured NBA writers in SB Nation's network (Photo courtesy of Dave Deckard).

Holdahl took a job with Oregon Live and handed off the fledgling domain to Deckard in 2006.

Deckard said despite the down years of the mid-2000s, Blazers fans were aching for a connection. "There was a core of fanatic people who were sticking to it," he said.

He believes Blazer's Edge gave those fans a place where their voices were important and listened to. "We created a sense of community that fans matter," he added.

As Deckard took over full-time blogging responsibilities, the Blazers' fortune took a turn, too.

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During the summer of 2006, the Blazers added LaMarcus Aldridge and Brandon Roy through the NBA draft.

The luck continued the following summer, when the Blazers landed the coveted number one overall draft pick. At the time, it appeared to be a can't miss situation, with Portland choosing either Ohio State University star Greg Oden or University of Texas phenom Kevin Durant.

Golliver started a blog pushing the Blazers to draft Durant. Golliver said the site was "very satirical, light-hearted and whimsical," and admittedly not an exercise in journalism. He soon joined Deckard at Blazer's Edge.

In December 2007, the team issued a media credential to Golliver, a rarity at the time for non-mainstream outlets. "I was interested in being a credentialed nobody," Golliver said.

For the next 7 years, Golliver and Deckard fed, and created, the content beast that Blazer's Edge became. There was plenty to write about, with the Blazer's sporting a new, likeable roster and more media-friendly front office, Oden's injury woes became the objective of national attention and drove traffic, too.

"Anything we could come up with within reason was being devoured," Golliver said.

The site became a destination for Blazers fans.

Golliver said site traffic averaged roughly 220,000 page views per month in 2007, but peaked in 2012 at "more than 15 times that."

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Seth Pollack, NBA manager for SB Nation's 33 professional basketball-related blogs, said Blazer's Edge was "ground-breaking" in creating and empowering a rabid community of readers. "Dave has really become the master of this," Pollack said of the community engagement, saying his methodology is the model used by other SB Nation sites.

Pollack said Deckard is one of the most tenured writers in the NBA network. He credits Deckard and Golliver for being "pioneers" in the NBA blogging work.

The passion of the Blazer's Edge community is occasionally an easy target nationally.

Just this week, Grantland's Bill Simmons derisively referred to the "Portland Soccer Moms" in a season preview ranking each team according to its entertainment value. The Grantland preview ranked Portland as a middle-of-the road team in terms of broad appeal. "I can already feel the 625-post Blazer's Edge thread coming. Just remember, Portland fans: Words hurt," Simmons wrote.

But the community support is undeniable. Deckard said he usually attends just one game per year, the site's Blazer's Edge Night, sitting among more than 1,000 kids the online site helps send to a game each year.

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After years of covering home games, Golliver jumped ship this summer for a full-time position with Sports Illustrated.

Golliver said if the Blazers hadn't won the 2007 draft lottery, "I don't know what I'd be doing right now."

He admits he learned the tools of journalism on the job, and thanked the Blazers for granting him access. "Uninformed opinions don't carry much weight," he said.

In the 2014-15 season, the Blazers will still grant media credentials to fan sites, but the new Blazer's Edge staff will have to prove itself to gain wider access behind a seat in assigned media sections.

Deckard doesn't think the website needs to have an in-person presence. He said the site's track record was instrumental in wooing several journalism grads to the fold.

When he and Golliver teamed up, neither was a well-known commodity. "Ben was a creative writer, I was a Blazers fan," he said. "We've evolved past that."

According to is website, Blazer's Edge has three staff writers (aside from Deckard and another editor), plus a handful of other contributors.

Deckard said he's ready for "the next generation" of writers to take the site in a new direction, and he said that doesn't necessarily mean having a reporter cover the games.

Being there, he said isn't that important, saying that access is "controlled" anyway.

"We are that somewhat independent voice," Deckard added.

Lewellen said the team's relationship with Blazer's Edge evolved over time as the site proved itself journalistically.

Now that process will begin again. "Familiarity can speak volumes," Lewellen said, and the new writers will have to earn respect and credibility.

-- Andrew Theen