Allen can rekindle that loving feeling

By Dwight Jaynes

The Portland Tribune, May 12, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009

I’ve been trying to figure out who would be the best possible owner of the Portland Trail Blazers. Been working on it now for a month. And I keep coming to the same conclusion. Sorry about this, because many of you aren’t going to like it:

Paul Allen. Not the current version of Allen, of course. I want Paul Allen, Version 1.0. And I want him under one condition Ñ but I’ll get to that in a moment.

For all my complaining about him, no owner in the NBA cares as much about his team as Allen. He loves it. The man, by and large, lives the life we’ve all dreamed about Ñ with the money, the hobnobbing with Hollywood stars and every single toy you could ever think about owning, from submarines to spaceships. But the centerpiece in his life, for years, has been the Portland Trail Blazers.

This is someone, the sixth-richest man in the world, who, when he was aboard the big yacht somewhere in South America, at a certain time of day, all things stopped while he pulled in the live satellite feed of that night’s Blazer game. He cared about his team Ñ loved it to the point of spoiling and overpaying his players.

At some point, I think, that love blinded him to what was happening to his franchise. He got a lot of bad advice, which, I’m afraid, he’s still getting. I’ve been told by people who know him that this whole process of selling the team is killing him.

If that’s the case, my advice to Allen is to simply step back, take a deep breath and gather those financial advisers of his for a little come-to-Paul meeting.

And then tell them that he’s going to do his best to get his team back on solid financial ground because he loves it too much to sell it. And that he’s going to write a check to the bondholders, get control of the arena again and make a fresh start. He might even be wise to hire all the people who are running the Rose Garden now for Global Spectrum to operate it for him. They’re doing a great job.

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