by Paul Allen
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.
CHAPTER 15
12TH MAN
If I entered the NBA out of passion, I was called to the National Football League out of civic duty. The Seattle Seahawks had been mired in mediocrity even before Ken Behring bought the franchise in 1988. By the midnineties, the team was losing more than $5 million a year. It had an absentee owner and a lackluster coach. The Kingdome, which it shared with the Seattle Mariners, was falling apart. The roof leaked, and four heavy ceiling tiles had dropped into the stands just before a baseball game.
In February 1996, Behring declared that he was moving the team to Southern California. The NFL refused to sanction the move. King County sued Behring for trying to break his Kingdome lease, and the owner countersued. With the Seahawks’ future so precarious, I was approached by a contingent of local politicians on the hunt for a buyer to keep the team in Seattle.
I liked football, but I didn’t plant myself in front of the TV all day Sunday. And I wasn’t on a quest to take on a second major-league team and all the responsibilities that came with it. Still, I was sympathetic. I went to four or five Seahawks games a year. I thought of Seattle as a three-sport city, and I knew how hard it was to retrieve a major-league franchise once a community lost one. In April, I agreed to a $20 million option to buy the team within fifteen months for approximately $200 million. I had one stipulation: I would exercise my option only if we could get a new stadium. Based on my experience with the Blazers, it made no sense to get involved unless revenues could cover the costs of resigning top players and pursuing the best free agents. You needed a first-class facility to generate that kind of money, and the Kingdome was grossly inadequate.
A new stadium would run $430 million, and I was willing to chip in close to a third of it. But the rest had to come from public funding*—not just to give me a fighting chance to make a modest profit, but to forge a public-private partnership that would keep the franchise in Seattle for the long haul, regardless of who owned it. My hometown had asked for help, and I wanted to respond, but I wasn’t about to go it alone.
T
he day after I negotiated my purchase option, the Seattle Times ran a story headlined “Allen’s Rescue Makes Him City’s Latest, Greatest Sports Superhero.” I guessed that it wouldn’t be long before the media changed its tune.
IN A DECEMBER 1996 Seattle Times poll, opponents of a new Seahawks stadium outnumbered supporters by eight percentage points. The one bright spot: Among ten local figures involved in the issue, I was the only one rated favorably. Unlike the politicians, I had no legacy of unpopular decisions. People knew me as a low-profile guy who’d cofounded Microsoft and who now might save the franchise.
As the six-week campaign over Referendum 48 unfolded, I was surprised by how many people still liked the Kingdome. While cities like New York constantly tear down and revitalize, Seattleites cherish their architectural icons, even the unsightly ones. To expand our constituency beyond hardcore football fans, we emphasized the new stadium’s potential to lure a major-league soccer team. We were making headway in the polls and had pulled almost even when opposing groups found traction with a superficially convincing argument. There was no need to vote yes on the stadium, they maintained, because I’d never walk away and let the Seahawks leave town. Political cartoons struck the same theme: Why doesn’t Paul just pay for all of it, since he can? Our poll numbers dropped. It looked like my wealth was working against me. As a Seattle Times columnist wrote, “Mr. Allen is a splendid fellow whose only drawback may be that he has too much money.”
I knew about voter resistance firsthand from the Seattle Commons project, where we’d pushed for a sixty-one-acre waterfront park to anchor industrial and biotech development in the South Lake Union neighborhood. Despite my pledge of $20 million, the voters twice defeated our proposal. (We’ve continued to revitalize South Lake Union, but without the park.) Now I put aside my aversion to TV appearances and took my case for a new football stadium directly to the voters. On June 2, two weeks before the referendum, I sat in a staged living room backdrop and taped a thirty-second spot: