Trail Blazers Owner Tom Dundon Stiffs Two-Way Players on Travel and the Cost-Cutting Spree Is Out of Control
The Portland Trail Blazers have a new owner, and Tom Dundon is making sure everyone knows he is going to run the franchise like a quarterly earnings call. The latest petty cost-cutting move involves refusing to cover travel expenses for the team’s two-way players during the playoffs. It is the kind of penny-pinching move that gets a billionaire roasted from coast to coast, and Dundon earned every second of the heat coming his way.
According to reporting from ESPN, the Blazers’ two-way players did not fly with the team to San Antonio for the start of their first-round playoff series against the Spurs. Every other playoff team in the NBA brought their two-way players on the trip, as is standard. Portland left them in Oregon to save on flights and hotels.
Two-way players are not eligible to play in the postseason. That is true. But every coach and front office in the league understands that bringing them along is about building culture. These are the young players who push the rotation in practice, who keep workouts competitive, and who study film with the team they hope to one day join full-time. Stiffing them on a playoff road trip sends a clear message about how the new ownership group views them, and the rest of the locker room is paying attention.
This is not even the worst of it. Dundon also told Blazers staffers to check out of their Phoenix-area hotel rooms hours before the first team bus left for the arena. The goal? Avoid paying late checkout fees. The same franchise that just sold for $2.3 billion is asking employees to lug their luggage around an arena for a few hours so the team does not have to pay an extra $50 per room.
The fan-facing cuts are just as ugly. Free T-shirts that the team gave out during home playoff games are gone. The team reporter who covers the Blazers and provides content to the team’s own website was not invited on the road playoff trip. Layoffs have hit the front office, with reports indicating at least 50 employees were let go in the first month of Dundon’s ownership.
Dundon also owns the Carolina Hurricanes in the NHL, where he built a reputation for similar moves. Bring in revenue, cut every cost in sight, squeeze every dollar out of the operation. It worked for the Hurricanes to a point. They became a profitable team. But the NHL is a sport where you can win on the cheap. The NBA is not.
The Blazers are coming off a season where they squeezed into the play-in and got bounced in the first round of the playoffs. They are a young team trying to build something around Scoot Henderson and a couple of promising lottery picks. The last thing they needed was a new owner sending the message that he is going to cut every corner possible. Free agency is six weeks away, and word travels fast in NBA agent circles. Players notice this stuff. Agents notice it. Free agents looking at Portland already had reasons to be skeptical. Now they have a whole new list.
The two-way players involved are not going to publicly complain. They cannot. They are trying to get NBA contracts. But the rest of the league is watching, and so are the players who already have contracts. The Blazers have a 1.5 million dollar coach salary cap, refused playoff travel for their own developmental players, and are now apparently negotiating hotel checkout times to save fifty bucks. That is not a basketball operation. That is a margin spreadsheet pretending to be a team.
Dundon will eventually have to choose. He can run the franchise like a Carolina-style efficiency project, or he can compete in a league where every other owner is throwing money at every possible competitive edge. Right now he is signaling loud and clear which one matters more. The Blazers fan base, who finally seemed ready to invest in a new era, is already losing patience.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
