The playoffs were in full swing.
And the Pioneer, a group of young men, had unbelievably won the Celestial King Mountain game, making the entire league take notice.
The year before last, the Pioneer were still saddled with the moniker of a "prison team"—notorious and a laughingstock.
When the Pioneer offloaded their core players and Rashid Wallace left for the Motor City, allowing the Pistons to soar into the finals, many in the media mocked the Pioneer. They believed the Pioneer had made a colossal blunder in trading away their core, and that they never should have let the Roaring Celestial Venerable go.
Even Rashid Wallace himself said that Portland was a quagmire and that he regretted wasting so much time with the Pioneer. With the Pistons, he felt he had been reborn.
But no one could have expected that in just one season, the Pioneer would return to the playoffs.
