Mike Celizic

The transformation of the Portland Trail Blazers is complete. Zach Randolph, the team leader on both the scoresheet and the police blotter, is going to New York.

The five-player trade that saw the Blazers acquire forward Channing Frye and guard Steve Francis in return for their power forward and guards Dan Dickau and Fred Jones was the icing on an evening that began with Portland snagging Greg Oden with the first pick in the draft.

I had thought of Oden as a pretty good guy with impressive basketball skills that, with work, could make him one of the top centers in the NBA. But after listening to the 37 analysts ESPN had working the draft, I find I underestimated him. He's a great guy, a cross between Martin Luther King, Ghandi and Mother Teresa. And his basketball skills — after one year of college — are better than either Patrick Ewing's or Tim Duncan's at the same age.

If all of that is true, or only half true, Portland should be one very happy city. And with the departure of Randolph, it will also be a somewhat more peaceful one.

Randolph was the last remaining member of the old Jail Blazer crew that brought so much disrepute on the franchise and the city. He's a big body with big skills — better than 23 points and 10 boards a game last season — but with Oden joining LeMarcus Aldridge up front, the Blazers don't need him. From the end of the season, there's been speculation that he would be moved.

Until draft night, the speculation didn't include the Knicks. But in the 3½ years Isiah Thomas has been running the franchise, he's made trades involving 45 players — 25 shipped out of town and 20 shipped in. So at some point, Portland must have spun the Rolodex, come up with 1-800-CALLZEKE, and asked what he had available. By the end of the call, the number of players involved in Thomas' trades had grown to 50.

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New York is either going to love Randolph or hate him, depending on whether he's grown up. Portland, on the other hand, won't miss him at all. Sure, he scored and rebounded, but he brought back too many painful memories — and created too many new ones.

He's got a rap sheet that goes back to 1995, when he was 13 or 14 years old and spent 30 days in juvenile detention in Marion, Ind., for shoplifting. In high school, he spent a month under house arrest for battery and another 30 days in juvy for receiving a stolen gun. In 2002, it was an underage drinking arrest, and the next year the Blazers suspended him for sucker-punching teammate Ruben Patterson in practice. There was a driving under the influence arrest that same year, an accusation the following year of lying to police, a suspension in 2006 for flipping off the fans, a sexual assault lawsuit.

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This year, he got in trouble when he took a bereavement leave from the team to attend the funeral of his girlfriend's cousin and spent the night at a strip club, leaving without paying his bill. Most recently, he was in a strip-club parking lot with teammate Darius Miles when a gun was fired.

Oh, and some people say that despite his production, he's got a lazy streak on the court.

But other than that, he's a sterling fellow who should fill the Knicks' niche once occupied by Latrell Sprewell.

Thomas feels he can bring out the best in players, and he did get Eddie Curry to play hard last year and even had Stephon Marbury passing the ball before shooting it at times. But as we all know, the opportunities to get into trouble in New York are somewhat greater than they are in Portland.

You have to hand it to the Blazers' front office. In just a few years, they've totally cleaned house, filled the roster with bright young talent, and lucked into Oden, potentially the most dominant big man to hit the league since Duncan.