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Six games out of 82. This hardly matters. But it's fun little early season bauble worth collecting: every team in the Northwest has a losing record except for the one that I support. Especially when they're supposed to suck.

The Blazers beat Chicago last night by a whisker to get to 3-3. The Oregonian's Jason Quick describes the key play, in which point guard Telfair showed two key abilities: to draw four defenders, and to be lucky enough to have a teammate grab the board when he broke the play, shot over all those guys, and missed badly:

McMillan drew a play for Telfair to drive and kick a pass to Dixon for an outside shot.

But Telfair found a lane to the basket after beating center Michael Sweetney around the corner and lofted a layup attempt over four Bulls players. The ball went hard off the backboard, hit the front of the rim, and Ratliff -- uncovered because of the attention to Telfair -- slammed the rebound through with two hands.

"Coach (Dean) Demopolous said 'Go to the boards,' and I was going anyway, but the coach let me know how to do it," Ratliff said. "They left Zach's man, and it left me free. It was a great play."

Marlen Garcia reports in the Chicago Tribune that Bulls Coach Scott Skiles is a fan of Portland Coach Nate McMillan's demanding ways:

"He's demanding a level of work from his players is what it seems like," Skiles said. "The league needs all of that it can get. I'm a fan of that. As a league, we're paying people an awful lot of money and the bare minimum ought to be a good day's work. I know Nate believes the same thing.

"He's in a spot where I'm sure he was hired to do that, to come in and change the culture here. I don't know when, but I'm sure he'll get it done."