If you are all correct that Sheed was right, then why was it necessary to go through a 5+ year purgatory of losing? Why did this happen:
1) The Oregonian demonizes Bob Whitsitt for giving us .700 teams because they underperform. After all, any city the Oregonian is involved in deserves an .800 team. The real reason is that black militants are injecting too much rebellious culture into a white town. The outsider-owned paper pressures Paul Allen for years to get rid of Whitsitt, using its advantage of controlling public opinion as the only daily in the state.
2) After winning the Whitsitt struggle, the paper is as gleeful as a child that Patterson & Nash come up with a Boy Scout 25 point rule that is tailored for a Sunday Sermon. P & N busily busy themselves with destroying the roster, to the great joy of the paper. With players' reputations around the league destroyed by the paper, they must be traded for less than their values in order to obtain moral paragons acceptable to the Oregonian.
3) P & N get sick of the Oregonian's interference. Everywhere players and management go, there is an Oregonian reporter checking on their moral performance. For example, to make Canzano like him, Sheed entertains him by playfully throwing a basketball the full length of a court at Boom Boom. Canzano lies that it hit Boom Boom in the Balls, while simultaneously reporting that Boom Boom had his back to Sheed. This was physically impossible unless the ball was a curving Son of the JFK Miracle Bullet. Canzano, who stands next to Sheed and so is a full court length away, claims to have telescopic vision as to where it hit Boom. He doesn't walk up to Boom and ask, and later, Boom never backs up Canzano's story. But to this day, Sheed's enemies on message boards repeat the story. Meanwhile the last hated player is gone, so in need of villains, the Oregonian finds the two left with the heaviest black accents--one who arrived during their own cleanup, Darius Miles, and one whom they formerly liked because he isn't rebellious to them, Zach Randolph.
4) After a new rule is promulgated--interviews must be taped because the Oregonian often later lies about what is said--the Big O turns against their heroes, P & N. With the paper almost finished in its ethnic cleansing of players, the only place left to find rebel enemies is in management. The Oregonian, realizing it can't run the team with the present management rebelling against the paper's belief that the paper owns the team, seeks a new GM to work under the Oregonian, I mean under Paul Allen. The official history becomes, P & N have never done anything right. Even today there are still suckers who still believe the Oregonian's references to the past. Every generation must rediscover this by watching a new war of ethnic cleansing to learn how to recognize a racist paper.
5) The Oregonian finds its latest hero and he instigates a policy of Cultural Cleansing. Only black players who act like white conservatives will be allowed in. Hey, it's not racist as long as you let blacks play, right? As long as they are the right ones. Same as Stern's dress code. As long as blacks dress just like Stern, looking like the dorkiest subset of white people, the white collars, they can stay in the league. Openly using the word "culture," Pritchard makes no trades other than for gullible young draft picks without accents. Any experienced (=poisoned) players accidentally received to balance trades are jettisoned fast. Not until late in his stay does Pritchard trade for one, Marcus Camby, and he's low risk because if he goes South, he'll retire in 2 years anyway, so Pritchard won't have to learn how to trade experienced players. The Oregonian is pleased with its political machinations and is outraged when its quasi-employee Pritchard has any problems with his Boss Only For The Record, Paul Allen.
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