CHAPTER 14
On March 13, 1986, Microsoft issued its initial public offering. I sold 200,000 shares and kept the rest, roughly 28 percent of the company. Overnight I was $175 million richer. For some time, I resisted advice to sell stock and diversify. Given how fast computers were improving, I figured that a dominant, well-run technology company like Microsoft would outperform just about anything else. I’d be proven right by the dizzying rise of the company’s market cap. By 1990, at age thirty-seven, I’d become a billionaire. By 1996, I’d be one ten times over.
As my attorney, Allen Israel, noted shortly after the IPO: “This wealth should enable you to do whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it. …” I made up my mind to exploit my new freedom. Life is short, and there was so much out there to do. I called Bert Kolde, my old Phi Kappa Theta roommate and by then my right-hand man, and said, “I want to buy an NBA team.”
I WAS A thin, gangly child with no conspicuous athletic talent. When my peewee church basketball team won the city title, I sat at the end of the bench and played the last few minutes of our blowouts. I have a vague memory of trying to dribble and shoot; the basket seemed way, way up there. I fared better on the playground at four square, where you hand-serve a large rubber ball into quadrants of a court. I liked to compete, but my modest athletic talents didn’t flower until high school soccer.
I had little exposure to the NBA before Microsoft moved to Bellevue in 1979, coinciding with the Seattle SuperSonics’ stretch run to its first and last championship season. I got caught up in the excitement and became a big fan. In June, after the Sonics finished off the Washington Bullets for the title, I was out among the people thronging the streets and honking their horns.
The next fall I bought my first season tickets. The SuperSonics began trading away their talent, and each year the team got a little worse and my seats got a little better, until I was stationed courtside across from the home bench. Sitting so close deepened my passion for the game. I thought the NBA was the greatest spectacle in sports—equal parts athleticism, ballet, teamwork, and individual grit. The action was almost nonstop, full of vivid moments. Unlike baseball or football, few games were decided with more than five minutes left. And what could match the beauty of a pure jump shot swishing through the net or a tough offensive rebound in traffic?
The Sonics of the early eighties weren’t a great team, but they were competitive and entertaining. When I got sick, they became my escape; I went to every game I could and caught the rest on television. I studied box scores in the newspaper while waiting for my radiation treatments, and devoured the Official NBA Register. If you asked about Sidney Moncrief’s foul-shooting percentage, I could rattle it off within a few percentage points.
The Sonics were a godsend in getting me through that difficult time. No matter how rotten I felt, there was always the next game to look forward to.
IN THE FALL of 1987, I heard that the Portland Trail Blazers might be available. Winners of a championship a decade earlier with Bill Walton, the team was owned by a Los Angeles developer named Larry Weinberg, a gentleman from the old school. I made an overture through Bob Barnett, my old TRW contact. Weinberg’s attorney told him that the Blazers were “not for sale, but we might entertain an offer.” They insisted that our meeting be private. If word leaked out, our discussions would be over.
That October we met with Harley Frankel, Weinberg’s most trusted associate. Going in, I told Bob I had one precondition: a price. I didn’t want to bid against myself. Frankel went on about the glories of the NBA, and how the Blazers were a rising franchise with top local TV ratings and sellouts for ten consecutive years. On our way out, I looked at Bob and said, “They didn’t give us a price.”
I thought the deal was dead, but then in March they called. I still had the itch to own a team, and this time I met with Larry face-to-face. For two hours, he told us his story—how the Blazers won the title the year after he’d become majority owner, but then Walton broke his foot and they’d never recovered. He’d get up in the middle of the night on some overseas business trip and listen over a radio feed for two and a half hours, and the next day was ruined if his team hadn’t won. “The losing starts to tear your guts out,” he said.
As we wrapped up, Weinberg said he would take $65 million. Ten minutes later, we had a handshake deal. I was thirty-five years old and the youngest owner in major-league sports.
In May 1988, I attended a media conference at the Trail Blazers’ office, my first time on the bright red, team-color carpeting. Weinberg said, “I would like to introduce you to the new owner of the team, Paul Allen.” Everyone was surprised; we’d been discreet, as promised. This level of public exposure was new to me, and I felt nervous about meeting the press, but Weinberg was extremely gracious. He made it clear that he wouldn’t have sold unless he’d found the right person for the team’s future success. I was “first of all a fan,” Weinberg told the reporters. “Unless you’re a fan, nothing else counts in this ownership.”
Early on, I met Clyde Drexler, the team’s superstar, and we hit it off. Clyde was sharp and candid, a free spirit on the surface but with a calculating edge underneath; I’d heard that he and Kiki Vandeweghe clashed with coach Mike Schuler, a brittle disciplinarian. Before the season started that fall, the two players asked to see me. I had them to my house on Mercer Island, just outside Seattle, and I should have known better. We’d barely sat down when the coach-bashing began: Schuler was a control freak who killed the players’ creativity, and so on.
Toward six o’clock, Clyde said, “Hey, Paul, we saw your basketball court on the way down. Do you ever use it?” In fact, I’d been spending a fair amount of time polishing my jump shot—I even had three-point range in those days. We shot around and then Kiki said, “Let’s play H-O-R-S-E.” I agreed, assuming I’d get creamed. But the players were polite enough to stick mostly to three-pointers, and I hung in there. It began to drizzle, and we turned on the lights. Whenever a stray shot bounced off the court, Clyde and Kiki raced across the slick mesh surface to grab the ball. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, I thought. What if somebody got hurt?
After I made the game-clinching three-pointer (they’d gone easy on me), Clyde said, “Hey, I want to dunk.” Kiki tossed the ball in the air, and Clyde took a flat-footed leap from under the basket. He was twenty-six years old, in his prime, and he met the ball maybe three feet over the ten-foot rim—caught it, dunked it. I’ve sat courtside at more than a thousand NBA games, but I’ve never seen anything quite like that soaring slam in the dark, in the rain, on my own outdoor court.
On his way out, Clyde said casually, “Can I call you sometime to talk about the team?”
“Of course,” I said. That was my second rookie mistake. It’s fine to be friendly with your players and to care about them, but you have to be careful about crossing the line. Get too close, and it may come back to bite you when it’s time to renew a contract or weigh a trade. In Clyde’s case, I got too close. For years afterward, I’d be awakened by the phone in the middle of the night.
“Paul, it’s Clyde.”
I’d say, “Who else would be calling me at three A.M.? How’s it going, Clyde?”
And he’d say, “We lost again.” He’d complain about a teammate who kept forgetting the plays—like most of us, Clyde was better at seeing others’ flaws than his own. We’d chat about the game until he got to the point: “Paul, it’s just not fair what I’m being paid.”
Shortly before I bought the team, Larry Weinberg had signed Drexler to a six-year contract averaging $1.3 million a year. The deal made him one of the best-paid players in the game, but then salaries escalated sharply and Clyde’s had lagged behind. “Paul,” he’d say, “I’m only the sixth-best-paid player on the team. You know that isn’t right.”
And I’d say, “But Clyde, you signed a contract. Nobody forced you to sign the contract.” We’d go back and forth, beating each other up until I’d plead exhaustion and hang up the phone. There was no simple resolution. On the one hand, Clyde did deserve more money. He had that special extra gear—the turbo, he called it—that you see only in the greatest players, and he’d won a lot of big games for us. On the other hand, I thought a deal was a deal. It seemed both illogical and a terrible precedent to tear up a contract just because a player had my home number.
A year or so after I became owner, my ties to Clyde affected my judgment and changed the course of two franchises. Bucky Buckwalter, an executive under general manager Geoff Petrie, brought me a blockbuster trade. “I think we can get Olajuwon for Clyde,” he said. Akeem (later Hakeem) Olajuwon was one of the top two or three centers in the game. I subscribed to the axiom that you always trade a smaller player for a bigger one of like talent, but this time I told Bucky to pass. I had concerns about Olajuwon’s long-term health after doctors had found a blood clot in his leg. (The condition turned out to be treatable.) But the other reason I held back was that Clyde was special—to the team and its tradition, but also to me personally. I didn’t want to see him go.
* * *
THE TRAIL BLAZERS struggled that first year. After word filtered out that the team’s black players felt alienated from the coaching staff, we hired Maurice Lucas, a respected star from the Walton years, as an assistant coach. But issues still festered, to the point where Sports Illustrated depicted the Blazers as a team rife with turmoil. I sent Bert on a midseason road trip, and he came back with a sobering report. The team was split into “ten and two,” with Clyde and Kiki the two. Everyone hated the coach, whom Clyde was doing his level best to undermine. Schuler responded with a bunker mentality. He’d schedule meetings with his staff and “forget” to tell Maurice Lucas. He was freezing Lucas out.
I wasn’t keen about disrupting the team with a midseason coaching change, but the divisions seemed irreparable. In February 1989, we fired Schuler and replaced him with Rick Adelman, then a little-known assistant. Kiki asked to be traded, and we packed him off to the Knicks, ending a controversy over playing time with the younger, more dynamic Jerome Kersey. After getting swept out of the first round of the playoffs by the Los Angeles Lakers, the team’s needs were obvious. The Blazers were strong on the perimeter with Clyde, Kersey, and point guard Terry Porter, but thin up front. With the oft-injured Sam Bowie missing most of the season, we had a short-armed center in Kevin Duckworth and a hole at power forward. Teams scored on us inside at will.
I’ve tried to strike a balance as team owner, to be involved and accountable while preserving my executives’ freedom to shape the roster. My job is oversight, not execution. While I sign off on trades or free agents, I’ve rarely overruled my basketball people’s decisions. But I’m not shy about steering the discussion or pushing deeper if something doesn’t make sense to me.
Shortly before the 1989 NBA draft, my first as a real participant, I attended an all-star game for top college players. My eyes were drawn to Cliff Robinson, a wiry six-ten center from the University of Connecticut with a constant scowl on his face. On tape he looked like a smooth and explosive athlete who could really shoot, my favorite combination. But Cliff had a reputation as a surly kid who didn’t play hard. On draft day, I sat in our war room and scanned the board that ranked our top prospects. As the second round began, Cliff was the only one left in the greenroom, where projected lottery picks waited to take the stage as their names were called. He was so hurt that he left and went back to his hotel.
By then I was lobbying hard to choose him. Second-round picks are low-risk propositions. Their contracts aren’t always guaranteed, and they can be easily cut if they don’t pan out. Bucky Buckwalter, who leaned toward long, athletic players, gave his assent. With little to lose, Geoff Petrie agreed to take a flier on Cliff.
That draft taught me how quickly a team’s fortunes can change with one or two good decisions. Buck Williams, newly acquired in a trade for Bowie, was the ideal addition to our starting lineup: tough, focused, a pillar of strength against larger players like Utah’s Karl Malone. Cliff was rangy, fast, and defense-minded, capable of playing three positions—another perfect fit. (He’d be named the league’s top sixth man in 1993 and an all-star the following year.) Together they helped vault the Trail Blazers from a losing record to 59–23, second best in the league. That squad was unselfish and relentless, and it was a privilege to watch them. After we beat the Celtics by thirteen points in Boston Garden, Red Auerbach said, “They just ran us right out of our gym.”
There’s a special bond in cities with a single major-league franchise. I’d heard about Blazermania coming in, but I didn’t know just how rabid the Portland fans could be. Our run that season unleashed a wave of pent-up fervor. We swept Dallas in the first round of the playoffs, and then Cliff set the tone against San Antonio by subbing for the injured Duckworth and holding the great David Robinson to nine points. Then came the Western Conference Finals against the high-scoring Phoenix Suns. Though I’m not demonstrative by nature, I got caught up in the collective emotion of that series, to the point where I was signaling three-point shots and waving the crowd to stand and cheer down the stretch. I’d punctuate a win by pointing to the fans and clapping, to thank them for their support. After we pulled out the clincher on the road, by three points, I got so carried away that I ran out to join the scrum of players on the court. When Buck Williams embraced me, it felt like getting hugged by a brick wall. Our magical ride finally ended in the NBA Finals, when the “Bad Boy” Pistons used their experience and toughness (and the timely shooting of Vinnie “Microwave” Johnson) to defeat us in five games.
We returned to the Finals in 1992, the coming-out party for Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls. Heading into the showdown, a Sports Illustrated cover story featured the players who’d finish one-two in the balloting for Most Valuable Player that year: Jordan and Drexler, who was billed as Jordan’s “No. 1 Rival.” That only stoked Jordan’s competitive fires, which never needed stoking in the first place. Worse yet, Clyde had to guard the league’s top scorer without his normal lateral movement. After arthroscopic surgery the previous September, he’d had his right knee drained half a dozen times.
Jordan was a streaky jump shooter at that stage of his career, making only 27 percent of his three-point shots during the season. But in game one in Chicago, he hit six of them in the first half on his way to 39 points. (After the last deep shot, he turned toward the broadcast table and shrugged, as if he’d surprised even himself.) We tried Cliff and Jerome on him, along with Clyde—all solid defenders, but it made no difference. Jordan had his “turbo” on. I’ve seen just one other person up close who compared to him, who wanted not only to beat you but to crush you if he could. Those two stood apart for raw competitiveness: Michael Jordan and Bill Gates.
We had our moments against the Bulls. Midway through the fourth quarter of a tight game four in Portland, Clyde tapped the ball away from Jordan and converted it into a dunk, setting off a surge that evened the series at two games apiece. Nearly giddy, I went into the locker room afterward and found Clyde slumped in front of his locker, completely exhausted, an ice bag on every joint. And I said, “Clyde that was a brilliant steal. You read Jordan perfectly.”
He looked up at me, shook his head, and said, “Stop, stop, you don’t understand. Most guys have two or three go-to moves; Jordan has nine. I guessed right, that’s all. I got lucky. Sometimes you get the bear, but usually the bear gets you.” Clyde knew the score. The Bulls, on the cusp of a dynasty, beat us in six games. Just around that time, to compensate for those years when Clyde was paid below the market, I gave him a $9.8 million, one-season extension, then the biggest yearly paycheck in the history of team sports. I thought he’d earned it.
Though we never won a title in the Drexler era, those were glorious years. I watched up to three hundred games a season, live and on TV; in remote locales like Hawaii, I had a special live satellite feed when the Blazers came on. When I was home in Seattle, I’d invite six or eight people to fly to Portland for each home game. My mother became one of our biggest fans, and she’d bring a friend and drink her tea and eat her cookies en route. Then she’d sit with me on the baseline and scold the referees in her dignified fashion. “You’ve got to call it the same way on both sides,” she’d say, as the nearest official rolled his eyes. For my mom, bad whistles were injustices, and she wasn’t going to sit by and not say anything.
One night we were playing the Sonics, and Sam Perkins—six nine and 235 pounds—barreled after a ball that was sailing out of bounds straight over my mother’s head. She threw up her hands as Perkins crashed into her, and then I noticed her holding her wrist. “It’s broken,” she said calmly. At halftime the team doctor iced and taped it, and I asked if she wanted to head home. “No,” she said firmly, “we’re going to watch the rest of the game.”
Over ensuing seasons, Adelman tied our younger players to the bench and stuck with the tight rotation of veterans who had gotten us to the Finals. But you can’t freeze time, and those guys were now on the downside. In 1994, we hired a new coach, P. J. Carlesimo, plus a new team president and general manager who would define the team’s next decade.
ARTICULATE, COOL, and deceptively bland, Bob Whitsitt had joined the Seattle SuperSonics in 1986. At age thirty, he was the youngest top executive in the league, known as Trader Bob for his nonstop personnel moves. He built a powerhouse team around Gary Payton, a pugnacious point guard, and Shawn Kemp, a wildly talented big man who’d never played in college. Those Sonics teams were bold, volatile, swaggering, and athletically gifted. In 1993–1994 they posted a record of 63–19, best in the league. Whitsitt was named NBA Executive of the Year, but his owner, Barry Ackerley, became disenchanted after the team got upset in the playoffs. Ackerley disconnected Whitsitt’s office phone to encourage him to resign. I jumped to hire him.
Clyde was promptly traded to the Houston Rockets, as he’d requested. I gave my favorite player the news and thanked him for his contribution, and it was an emotional moment for us both. That spring I rooted for him from afar as he helped Olajuwon win a title. I’d always considered Clyde a champion, and now it was official.
Whitsitt proceeded to overhaul our aging roster as he’d done in Seattle, drafting young athletes with upside and adding big-name veterans. A few of his moves were brilliant, like the six-for-one deal that brought us Jordan’s all-star sidekick, Scottie Pippen, just one year removed from the last of his six championships with the Bulls. But there were too many times when Whitsitt operated like a rotisserie-league GM, piling up players with gaudy numbers. He openly professed that he cared only about talent, to the exclusion of character and other intangibles. “I didn’t take chemistry in college,” he told the media. With enough physical ability on the floor, team cohesion would take care of itself. It was a risky assumption for a sport in which five men share one ball.
With hindsight, Whitsitt temporarily staved off decline by using my wallet to load up on pricey long-term contracts—players who were available because they were overpaid or had off-court issues or both. Over a span of seven years, he would draft, sign, or trade for Rasheed Wallace, Isaiah Rider, Damon Stoudamire, Bonzi Wells, Shawn Kemp, Ruben Patterson, Qyntel Woods, and Zach Randolph. Any one of them would have been a handful. Despite the presence of some notable good guys, like Arvydas Sabonis and Steve Smith, they became known as the Portland Jail Blazers.
How could I tolerate this stew of instability? The short answer was that we kept winning. Over the last six years of Whitsitt’s tenure, the Blazers won 63 percent of their games, fourth best in the league. We made the playoffs each year and twice reached the conference finals, enough success to give me pause about shaking up the organization. I can be patient to a fault, and Whitsitt had his strengths. He was plugged into the player agent network like nobody else, and I counted on his connections to get deals done. He was also a great rationalizer. When I’d ask why a draft pick fizzled or a trade backfired, he’d respond, “Just watch. Next year he’s going to be so much better.”
When you come so close to winning a championship, as we had in the early nineties, it makes you that much hungrier because you know what the Finals taste like. It was the same for Whitsitt, who was desperate to validate his approach with a title. We were perpetually one big-salaried veteran away from contention, and our payroll ballooned. Deep down I knew that something was wrong. In the playoffs, when the pressure peaks and higher-caliber opponents target your weaknesses, a player’s makeup is revealed in performance. In the 2000 Western Conference Finals against the Lakers, we fell behind three games to one and then fought back to earn a deciding seventh game. Up fifteen points in the final quarter, it looked as though we were headed to the NBA Finals against Indiana, whom I thought we could beat. When I watch my team in the playoffs, I get superstitious; I try not to think about how much I want to win. Whatever happens, I’ll be fine with it. The players tried their best. But in that fourth quarter, I succumbed. I couldn’t deny it. I really wanted to beat the Lakers.
Within minutes, the Blazers unraveled. We missed thirteen consecutive shots. Our players suddenly looked as though they’d met for the first time that morning. The coup de grâce came when Shaquille O’Neal dunked an alley-oop from Kobe Bryant with forty seconds left.
That seventh game exposed us as a team without leadership or discipline. I’ll never forget the feeling I had when we boarded our plane—still festooned with Beat LA stickers—and headed home, our season done. It was a crushing defeat, and it took me a long, long time to get over it.
IN 2002, EIGHT years after Whitsitt’s arrival, we fell into the abyss. We led the league in payroll at $106 million, $44 million more than the championship Lakers. We were $65 million over the salary cap and $50 million over the league’s new luxury tax threshold, which had been designed to level the playing field for small-market teams like ours. Our player salaries cost us an outrageous $156 million, all for a medium-to-good fifty-win team that would lose yet again in the first round of the playoffs.
Off the court, it was worse, as the Trail Blazers became exhibit A for all that was wrong with professional sports. I found myself reeling from one lowlight to the next.
November 9, 2002: Bonzi Wells is suspended for spitting on the Spurs’ Danny Ferry.
November 22: Co-captains Damon Stoudamire and Rasheed Wallace, on their way home from a game in Seattle, are pulled over and cited for possession of marijuana. To settle the case, both agree to attend drug counseling sessions.
November 25: Ruben Patterson is arrested for felony domestic abuse. His wife later asks prosecutors not to pursue charges.
January 15, 2003: Rasheed is suspended for threatening a referee.
April 3: Zach Randolph is suspended after sucker punching Ruben in the face during practice and fracturing his eye socket.
The fans who felt so close to the Drexler-Kersey-Porter Blazers were disenchanted. Our attendance suffered, and our TV ratings fell by half. The wayward players showed little remorse. Bonzi Wells told Sports Illustrated: “We’re not really going to worry about what the hell [the fans] think about us.” You could see why parents weren’t rushing out to buy Bonzi or Rasheed jerseys for their kids.
One day I said to Whitsitt, “What’s it like in the locker room? How is the team reacting to the latest incident?”
And he said, “Well, Paul, half our guys are normal and half our guys are crazy. The good guys are all freaked out, but the crazy guys are crazy, so they’re fine.”
I’d heard enough. A team might be able to absorb one erratic personality, but who could win with a group that was half crazy? Three days after our season ended, I fired Whitsitt and gave his successor, Steve Patterson, a mandate to clean house. We traded established starters like Rasheed and Bonzi for forty cents on the dollar while letting bad contracts expire. The win-now regime had stunted younger talents like Jermaine O’Neal (who blossomed into a six-time all-star after being moved to Indiana), and our cupboard was bare. In 2004, the Blazers missed the playoffs for the first time in twenty-one years.
And then we sank even lower. An internal investigator came to me with a report on Qyntel Woods: “We think there may be dogfighting at Qyntel’s house.”
Dogfighting? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
A few days later: “We think there may be some dogs buried in his yard.”
Buried in his yard?
And a day or two after that: “There’s a room in his house where we hear the walls are covered with blood.”
Blood on the walls?
I was shocked and mortified. Qyntel eventually pleaded guilty to animal abuse and got eighty hours of community service. We suspended and then released him three months later.
The next year we touched bottom. With a record of 21–61, the Trail Blazers were indisputably the worst team in the league. Though things were quieter off the court, I had a new challenge: how to pay for my team’s home court.
The old Memorial Coliseum, with our fans seated nearly on the floor, was famously intimidating for visiting teams. It was also the smallest arena in the NBA, with no signage, luxury suites, or big-screen replays. In 1993, at a cost of $262 million, we built the Rose Garden. I put in $46 million to Portland’s $34 million, with most of the balance covered by bonds from a group led by a teachers’ pension fund. The interest rate was a stiff 8.99 percent, with no option for prepayment or refinancing.
As we discovered too late, the financial formula was fatally flawed. Add a local downturn and an unpopular losing team, and we had a perfect storm of red ink and disaffection. The Blazers were getting booed at home, once unthinkable in Portland. Our season ticket holders were canceling in waves amid calls for a boycott, despite our explicit efforts to rebuild and start over. All told, I’d invested more than half a billion dollars in the franchise, at a huge net loss. Something had to give.
In February 2004, my Oregon Arena Corporation filed for bankruptcy to push our creditors to restructure the Rose Garden loan. When we failed to reach a compromise, the bankruptcy court conveyed the arena to the lenders, with its sagging revenues to continue to be split among us. In 2006, as our deficit mounted, we announced that we’d entertain bids on the team. I was banking on the creditors’ reluctance to kill the golden goose or possibly shove it out of town. No one wanted to see the Blazers leave Portland, least of all their owner.
* * *
THE NBA DRAFT is one of my favorite days of the year. I begin preparing weeks ahead of time, poring over our five-hundred-page draft book and watching hours of college game highlights. The day before the big event, I convene with our personnel guys in Portland to watch more film and hear from our international scout. Then we head to a restaurant to hash out player rankings over dinner.
In the 2006 draft lottery, we started with some bad luck; despite our NBA-worst record, we were picking fourth. By then we’d handed the operation’s reins to Kevin Pritchard, who had a good gut for gauging young talent. Meanwhile, we got word about a rangy UW guard named Brandon Roy who didn’t look all that impressive on videotape. But in a private workout, he was bigger, quicker, and more explosive than we’d expected. After some draft-day maneuvers, we wound up with both Brandon and LaMarcus Aldridge, the skilled big man out of Texas that I coveted: two young men of unquestioned character. That was a banner night for us, a turning point for the franchise.
Shortly after the draft, I pulled the Blazers off the market. The next February, literally minutes before the case was set to be filed in court, the bondholders agreed to a restructuring and I bought back the Rose Garden. In June, a month after Brandon Roy was named Rookie of the Year, we traded Zach Randolph to the Knicks, ending an era that none of us would miss. The following season, we had the youngest team in the league and not a single arrest or suspension. The culture had changed, and it was my pleasure to invite the Blazers to Mercer Island for practice on Easter Sunday, 2008. After a light run-through, Coach Nate McMillan said he would end practice early if I could make a foul shot. The pressure was on. I walked to the line, took two dribbles, and banked the ball in. The players cheered.
The next year, with strong play from Brandon and LaMarcus and unselfish teamwork all around, the Trail Blazers shared a division title and returned to the NBA playoffs for the first time in six years. We lost a tough first-round series to Houston, but you wouldn’t have known it from the thousands who jammed Pioneer Courthouse Square to celebrate. Like me, the fans had never stopped loving their team. They’d been through rocky times with us, but Blazermania was alive and well.
Today we’re building a contender the old-fashioned way, the way it was done in the Walton-Lucas era or with the Drexler editions. Before we add a new player, we ask ourselves: How would he fit? Does he work hard? Will he balance his ego with the needs of the team? If we can’t answer yes to all of the above, we don’t do the deal.
AS OF THIS writing, at the start of the 2010–2011 season, the Trail Blazers are working on a new streak of sellouts, 124 and counting. After replacing Kevin Pritchard (who struggled in the managerial parts of his job) with Rich Cho, we believe that we’ve found a leadership team that can get us back to the Finals. Under team president Larry Miller, our season ticket base has tripled since the Whitsitt era, and local TV ratings are among the league’s highest.
That’s the good news. The bad is that we’re doing just about everything right, but we’re still losing money. With Brandon and LaMarcus now signed to contract extensions, we won’t be turning a profit anytime soon, a fact that speaks volumes about the plight of smaller-market franchises in the NBA. Team ownership can be very satisfying, but nobody enjoys losing money. As in any business venture, the bottom line is the ultimate measure of success.
According to Forbes, twelve of thirty teams were in the red in 2008–2009. A recent study showed that a team’s net income had more than twice as strong a correlation with market size than with winning percentage. Teams in larger markets have built-in advantages: higher ticket prices (based simply on supply and demand), more lucrative local cable TV deals. Their deeper stables of Fortune 1000 companies generate sponsorship dollars and luxury-suite sales.
Whatever the outcome of our ongoing collective bargaining agreement negotiations with the players’ union (the current deal expires on June 30, 2011), the NBA has yet to address this big market/small market discrepancy. Sports economist Andrew Zimbalist has noted that in the NBA less than 30 percent of revenue comes from shared revenue. In the National Football League, he has said, it’s as much as 75 percent.
Every owner wants to win, and the free-spending Whitsitt mentality is alive and well in some quarters. But then it’s February, you’re at .500, free agent X has misplaced his jump shot, and you’re staring at another eight-figure loss. It can get demoralizing. Before long, the league may become stratified into haves and have-nots, with small-market teams shaving player payrolls just to stay afloat and large-grossing teams having “huge economic disparities to utilize to make them better,” as NBA Commissioner David Stern said recently. At that point, only four or five franchises will have a legitimate shot at a championship. You’ll see more half-empty arenas as people weary of watching their lovable losers get hammered. Top free agents will focus on fewer cities, typically those with the best media and promotional opportunities. National interest and TV ratings can’t help but suffer.
Or as Stern put it, the NBA “is viable as long as you have owners who want to continue funding losses. But it’s not on the long term a sustainable business model. …”
During the throes of the Rose Garden’s bankruptcy, I met with Stern in New York. When I asked him what alternatives he saw for me, the commissioner told me, “Well, you can always sell your team.” But I wasn’t looking to bail out; I wanted to fix things. And even had I sold, the next owner would have faced the same predicament.
In my perfect world, the most successful NBA teams wouldn’t necessarily be those with the biggest local television markets or corporate-suite bases. They’d be the ones with the best talent judges, management, and coaching, big market or small.