It starts from the top down.....

[Ghost Pepper]

Great Teams "Championship Teams" have great owners and management, and they set the trend that filters down to the coaches and players and even to the fans....

So when the fingers start pointing around here maybe for once we get to the heart of this teams problem. Paul Allen come on down!

We have an owner who lives in WA, ownes the seachickens, employs non basketball minded consultants to make decisions for our team and even went as far as hiring MR. FREAKIN SONIC as our coach! It's bad mojo to hire our biggest rivals beloved son as our coach. Like hiring Suge Knight to unify the Crips! I think we all question if Paul Allen truly understands how to put together a championship organization. His decision making has been suspect every step of the way.

Paul Allen needs to get out of Ptown, bring the sonics back to seattle and take Nate with him. Ptown is not seattles little sister charity! We need a new owner and a new start! An owner that knows the power of this fan base and truly respects it! This is Nike Town isn't it? Hint Hint!!


Ya know Ptown fans never let their team down, always sell out the tickets year after year, and the thanks the blazers top brass gives back? Inflated ticket prices, 9 dollar beers and not even playoff shirts for the loyalty of 30 plus sold out years. Meanwhile a team like the Hornets who are owned by the NBA cause their city is soooo broke gives their fans shirts for every playoff game. Isn't Paul Allen the second wealthiest owner in the NBA? It's not about the shirts, it's about the respect to the fans and giving back to them for not leaving when they could have jumped ship and with good reason last year. Our franchise players Roy and Oden coming up lame, a coach painfully outclassed for how many playoffs series, and no real go to man in the clutch! Good reasons to leave and spend your money elsewhere especially in a depressed economy that Ptown has strongly been affected by. But no... Ptown fans come back year after year, because they are loyal! My question to the blazers owner and management are they REALLY LOYAL TO US?

The fix needs to start from the top down!

 

[Mediocre Man]

I am on record about 1700 times saying I don't like the Seattle connection. That being said, I still think PA is a decent owner, but I would like him to stop putting people around him that he is comfortable with, and start putting people with basketball knowledge around him

 

[Ghost Pepper]

I too believe it's a conflict of interest!

 

[BrianFromWA]

You'd think a billionaire who's been around the game for 20 years would have at least a couple of buddies who know basketball.

 

[PapaG]

You'd think a billionaire who's been around the game for 20 years would have at least a couple of buddies who know basketball.

Hat Guy and Bert Kolde don't know hoops?

 

[BrianFromWA]

Man, I'm getting decimated today. How dare I forget Kolde?

 

[Ghost Pepper]

Some people go to a game because it's entertainment, others because they are true "LOYAL BASKETBALL FANS!" I think Paul Allen is the first and we need the later to be a succesful championship organization. This team has to be more than an expensive hobby, the Blazers have to be your passion as it is for Cuban!

 

[illmatic99]

I didn't realize there was such a rivalry between POR and SEA.

 

[Weav]

Did you guys hear Wheels introduce hat guy on the radio the other day (game 5) as 'supreme consultant Steve Gordon'? It was at the point when he was done mentioning Cho and Medina before the starting lineups. Supreme consultant?!? Maybe he's the reason no one has any fire...

 

[mercykersey]

You guys have shit for brains, you should be on your knees thanking your god that Paul is the owner. Paul is hands down the best owner in the NBA. Hes the richest by far in all of sports, and spends more then any owner when his team is Championship Caliber..
Hes not coaching, hes not playing on the court, hes not the GM.. Hes the Man who has struggled twice with cancer and wants a Championship BADLY befor he dies, which could be soon.. Paul saved Northwest Pro football and saved the Blazers, where a Donald Sterling,Howard Schultz, or Maloof fuckfaces would have moved or sold the team to Oklahoma city in an instant (see seattle sonics).
I thank god we have Paul Allen, a class guy who stays out of the limelight and does everything possible to bring us a championship! He can't make Phil Jackson or Greg Popavich coach here in portland, they dont want to!! He cant make Lebron,Kobe,Dwight Howard, or even Chris Paul, Carmello, or Derron Williams play here, THEY DONT WANT TO COME TO PORTLAND!!! Paul does everything he can, portland is not a city where stars want to come, Portland,Oregon sucks in the eyes of the NBA STARS..

I thank your god for Paul Allen, I STRONGLY think hes the best owner in the NBA by far. One more thing, when Paul passes away, hes leaving all his money(15billion) to charity.. Suck on that fuckers.

 

[Ghost Pepper]

mercykersey-

One might also think that Paul Allen could spend a little money making the Portland Trailblazers an attractive place for top FA's to want to come to! Brandon Roy was rookie of the year and a two time allstar and the rest of the country wouldn't know... why? Cause he wasn't well marketed... This ties right into my point about an owner that really doesn't care about building a championship team. It's marketing and building around personalities. For goodness sake NIKE is our home grown company! Make some commercials! JEEZ! Orlando isn't a huge market and OKC is an awful place to live but we all know about KD and Howard! Why? Well marketed!

Oh an as for weather I'd pick Ptown over Boston, Chicago and Detroit any day of the week in winter when the majority of bball is played.

 

[jlprk]

Paul Allen is a great owner.

Issue 1: Paul Allen lives in Seattle. Why don't we have a local owner?

Seattle has only a couple of other billionaires and Portland has one. None want to own an NBA team.

The 1970s Sonics owner was from Los Angeles, Sam Schulman. He sold to Barry Ackerley, from Iowa, living in Los Angeles. He sold to Starbucks Schultz from the East but now in Seattle, who wasn't rich enough so he had 80 small-time millionaire partner owners. He couldn't manage this herd of cats when the team needed several cash infusions. They looked for a buyer in Seattle, and as before, sold to someone out of town. Any of those owners could have moved the team, and now finally one did, Clay Bennett.

Yet some Blazer fans think it would be easy to find a local Blazer owner. Portland has no billionaire who wants to own the team, but was lucky to find one much nearer than Los Angeles in nearby Seattle. The next owner will be at best from California, and at worst from farther like Oklahoma. Count your lucky stars that we have one as close as Seattle.
-----------------------
Issue 2: Paul Allen runs the team with fewer basketball experts than other teams. So what if he's willing to lose money and they aren't. He should have a magic strategy, like other owners. Why oh why won't he copy their magic strategies? He must have no organizational ability.

Q: He has his old friend Bert Kolde and Hat Guy running around checking people's performance and advising him. Allen doesn't know basketball and has a couple of intellectual friends who didn't play checking those who do.

A: Big fucking deal. Which owner does it any other way. Every owner has some friends around him acting as informers. Would you trust your money to new hires? If you've run even a small business, you know you want a layer of underlings you trust, to advise you on what the new experts half your age are doing.

Q: He got his wealth through luck. There's a book called "The Accidental Billionaire."

A: Name me a billionaire who didn't. Most of getting rich comes from being in the right place at the right time. He invented something and somebody else made it profitable. You think this is is the first time for that in history? I'm looking at you, PapaG.

 

[jlprk]

The initial Blazer owners were Weinberg (Beverly Hills, CA), Schmertz (New Jersey), and Sarkowsky (Seattle immigrant from Germany). Weinberg sold to Allen (Seattle born and raised, you won't do better).

Therefore, of all Blazer and Sonic owners in history, Allen is by far the most local. Schultz was probably second best, yet he's the one who sold to someone who moved it. So a local owner doesn't mean loyalty when there's no local buyer.

I mentioned PapaG because he keeps mentioning the book "The Accidental Billionaire" which says Allen was lucky. Duh. Which billionaire wasn't.

 

[KevinJBonn]

Phil Knight "owns" the ducks. He doesn't want an NBA team. Period.

But you know, why don't we trade in our owner who is at almost every game and loves the team as much as all of us do for Donald Sterling. Or maybe we could get the bull in a china shop Prokhorov who has all the money in the world but managed to attract ZERO free agents to a team with what looks like on paper to be a very bright future.

No, I'm happy with the owner who will extend Greg Oden a QO on a hunch this summer because that move has enough upside to make us a contender. I'll keep the guy who has a heliport and a god damned condo in the RG so that he can go to these games even though he doesn't live here.

 

[yenniedn]

Look it JLPRK dropping mad knowledge on another post-loss yardape gripe thread.

Repped (to jlprk of course).

 

[Ghost Pepper]

WOW - here's yenniedn to bottom feed again! Catfish might be more appropriate!

 

[jlprk]

Thanks, although Yardape's right (in another thread) that we need a new coach.

 

[Ghost Pepper]

Great so Paul Allen loves the team? Loves the city? Loves the Fans? Right? So why doesn't he spend his money on strong marketing campaigns that will make this city and team an attractive place for a superstar player to call home? Further why does he allow the Vulcans who know shit about hoops to make decisions that effect our team? The goal is to win a championship right? Or is it just to show up? If it's just to show up than Nate makes perfect sense here.

The foundation to my original post is does this owner really want to win? Is he taking the right steps to do so? His track record says to me NO! I mean who fires the GM at the draft?

 

[KevinJBonn]

An owner fires a GM at the draft when he feels like the GM is taking the team in the wrong direction. Can you honestly say that Cho hasn't done a better job? He's pulled the trigger on and gotten things done that KP was only dreaming about.

 

[Ghost Pepper]

Phil Knight doesn't own the Ducks... I'm sure the NCAA wouldn't like to hear that! hmmm moving on.....

I think the enthusiasm you see from Phil about his ducks is exactly the type of enthusiasm I'd like to see the owner take here with the Blazers. The ducks 15 years ago were just okay in the Pac 10. Now they are the hot spot to be and every university is trying to be like the OOOOOO! That comes from great marketing campaigns and running a program well from the top down. No different than what I'm suggesting here! Duck fans and Blazer fans are one and for the most part the same loyal and enthusiastic!

 

[jlprk]

why doesn't he spend his money on strong marketing campaigns that will make this city and team an attractive place for a superstar player to call home?

Any marketing campaign would be wasted, since the Oregonian has a powerful anti-marketing plan. The paper nationally devalued Sheed, Zach, etc. so that we got little for them. When those players went to areas with normal NBA media, they excelled.

If Allen spends on a constructive image, the Oregonian will counter by increasing its micro-coverage of negative personal details. The Oregonian hates the team (especially ghetto accents), and laughingly makes sport of destroying it.

 

[Ghost Pepper]

I think when your owner fires his GM on draft day and still expects him to make pics..... your owner looks like a clown!!

 

[PapaG]

The initial Blazer owners were Weinberg (Beverly Hills, CA), Schmertz (New Jersey), and Sarkowsky (Seattle immigrant from Germany). Weinberg sold to Allen (Seattle born and raised, you won't do better).

Therefore, of all Blazer and Sonic owners in history, Allen is by far the most local. Schultz was probably second best, yet he's the one who sold to someone who moved it. So a local owner doesn't mean loyalty when there's no local buyer.

I mentioned PapaG because he keeps mentioning the book "The Accidental Billionaire" which says Allen was lucky. Duh. Which billionaire wasn't.

Harry Glickman was the person responsible for the Blazers getting the expansion franchise, and he then turned to the outside investors. Up until the day that Paul Allen bought the team, although Glickman wasn't the majority owner (Weinberg was), he did oversee the daily operations of the team for the entire history of the franchise. He was born and raised in Portland. How you could completely ignore him in a "history" of the franchise is baffling to me.

 

[Ghost Pepper]

How can you hate this team? The bad boy days are over! I think now is the perfect time to put a campaign around Crash and LA, this city will eat that up especially how high Ptown is on these guys right now.

 

[PapaG]

An owner fires a GM at the draft when he feels like the GM is taking the team in the wrong direction. Can you honestly say that Cho hasn't done a better job? He's pulled the trigger on and gotten things done that KP was only dreaming about.

Such as what? Creating an older roster that won less games than the previous season, and again lost in the first-round of the playoffs?

Year one of Cho wasn't exactly a huge win for the franchise, and the Wallace trade was a "team effort", according to Jordan pal Larry Miller.

 

[jlprk]

Harry Glickman was the person responsible for the Blazers getting the expansion franchise, and he then turned to the outside investors. Up until the day that Paul Allen bought the team, although Glickman wasn't the majority owner (Weinberg was), he did oversee the daily operations of the team for the entire history of the franchise. He was born and raised in Portland. How you could completely ignore him in a "history" of the franchise is baffling to me.

Glickman found the 3 original owners I listed, but wasn't an original owner himself. As the GM, did they later pay him a few shares of ownership, so that he eventually became a small minority owner?

I just looked it up and there is no mention of him being even a minority owner. This thread is about how impossible it is to get a very rich local owner, not a nonowner organizer who finds nonlocal owners (not very rich either, poor enough to need 3 partners) as he did. Even if they later gave Glickman a few shares (did they?), he's still not an example of a very rich local Blazer owner. Paul Allen would still be the most local owner in both Blazer and Sonic history.

 

[PapaG]

Glickman found the 3 original owners I listed, but wasn't an original owner himself. As the GM, did they later pay him a few shares of ownership, so that he eventually became a small minority owner?

I just looked it up and there is no mention of him being even a minority owner. This thread is about how impossible it is to get a very rich local owner, not a nonowner organizer who finds nonlocal owners (not very rich either, poor enough to need 3 partners) as he did. Even if they later gave Glickman a few shares (did they?), he's still not an example of a very rich local Blazer owner. Paul Allen would still be the most local owner in both Blazer and Sonic history.

My point was that you ignored Glickman's role, as a Portland native, in attaining and then running the franchise until Paul Allen bought the team. Shame on you.

 

[jlprk]

I must not be thinking clearly. I don't see how this bogeyman you just invented shows 1) how we can find a super-rich local owner to replace Allen, or shows 2) why Allen is bad for having Kolde and the the Hat Man around.

So tell me, how are either of those 2 items proven by your fact that nonowner Glickman recruited 3 owners, who made him their GM? Following your logic, you could also say that since Whitsitt did the legwork to advise Allen to become Seahawks owner, this makes Whitsitt an example of how the Blazers could find a more local replacement for Allen.

Huh? Do you have any idea of what you're talking about? Are you dizzy from watching those hamburgers flip in the air? Hold your head steady.

 

[yenniedn]

WOW - here's yenniedn to bottom feed again! Catfish might be more appropriate!

Huh what? Replying to YOUR thread is bottom feeding? Is that an indictment on me or you?

So are these an amendment to the "rules" you set forth for Nate the other day? Let's see:

Yardape's Rules for NBA Owners:

* all owners must live in the city in which their team plays - no exceptions.
* all owners must only hire coaches & assistants that have played for the team and no other teams.
* no owner should ever hire away talent from any rival - this is considered bad form.
* all owners must provide free t-shirts to fans to keep them happy.
* all owners must ignore any small market disadvantages and snatch top FA's away from more metropolitan, diverse and glamorous locations like LA, Chicago and South Beach. Paul Allen only: if your city's weather sucks, either don't tell them about the rain & overcast skies or just buy new weather (you can afford it).
* all owners must be more like Mark Cuban because all Dallas does is win NBA titles year after year after year.

Did I miss anything or can I go ahead and email the list to PA now?

 

[jlprk]

Now that I'm done persuading everyone that Paul Allen is a genius, let's return to the real issue. How do we persuade the moron to fire McMillan?