New Blazers Owner Tom Dundon Not Exactly Inspiring Confidence

Tom Dundon readily admits his parsimony. I guess no one ever got turbo-rich by being profligate, but few billionaires brag so much about how they pick up pennies from the ground or turn off unused room lights. He claims he does not display this behavior when it comes to putting the sports teams he owns in position to win. This is a questionable assertion.

As the owner of the NHL's Carolina Hurricanes, his philosophies manifested in offering league-low salaries for GM and head coach. That coach, Rod Brind’Amour, was initially making less than many assistant coaches around the league. Many successes and one extension later, Brind’Amour got a raise that kept him in the bottom half-dozen coach salaries. Now on his second extension and in his eighth straight postseason, he's somewhere in the middle of the pack, salarywise—all he had to do was put together the league's most consistently successful team for Dundon to pay him like a normal coach. The Hurricanes' victories are entirely due to their canny front office and uniquely coached systems, and one suspects that the lesson Dundon has taken from striking gold while mining for tin is that he is a genius, and that everyone else is overpaying for talent.

When Dundon finalized his purchase of the NBA's Portland Trail Blazers earlier this spring, he almost immediately started putting the screws to the budget. He is reportedly offering well below market rate for a head coach. Interim coach Tiago Splitter, who did a fab job since taking over unexpectedly in October, is reportedly getting lowballed already. Jared Dudley, architect of the Nuggets' disastrous defense, is reportedly a candidate, presumably because he'd come cheap; he surely won't have other suitors.

It goes beyond hiring. Fans attending the Blazers' two home games before their first-round elimination received not the traditional T-shirts, but much cheaper towels. Before the play-in game in Phoenix, staff were forced to work in a hotel lobby to avoid late check-out fees. And the team's three players on two-way contracts, who traditionally travel with their team to postseason games even though they're not eligible to play, were left at home to save a few bucks.

Dundon, who made his billions in subprime lending, hears the "cheap" talk, and rejects it. On Friday he appeared on the Game Over podcast hosted by Max Kellerman and Rich Paul, his first public appearance since purchasing the franchise. He insists he's willing to spend money where it matters.

"I just don’t want to waste money. I want to invest it. I’ll have many masseuses. I’ll have the best food. We’re going to take care of the players, because it helps you win. It’s part of the deal. Some of the stuff about how we’re going to run the business; Portland spends 100 million more dollars a year on their business than the Hurricanes do, not including players.

“The Hurricanes, since I bought the team, have the first or second-best record in the league. So, I’m just not going to waste 100 million dollars, just because somebody wants to write an article calling me cheap. I’m just not going to do it. And so, it’s hard because I don’t think about a budget when it comes to the playing team and how to make sure we win."

Were I an employee or even a fan of the Blazers, I would not be thrilled to hear my owner immediately talking about the $100 million in expenses he clearly intends to cut not because it's inherently excessive, but because he wants to equalize it with what's being spent by the business he owns in an entirely different sport.

In leagues with both salary caps and salary floors, there's only so much variation in how much can be spent on payroll, though Dundon claimed he would have been "fine with" the Blazers paying the luxury tax on a deadline deal that didn't end up happening, so it remains purely in the realm of the hypothetical. (The Hurricanes sometimes spend to the cap, sometimes don't, and as Dundon noted, have previously exceeded it when circumstances allow.) As for the Phoenix fiasco, Dundon blamed it on the hotel wanting them to check out early(?).

When it came to leaving the two-way Blazers at home, however, Dundon's answer didn't exactly instill a lot of confidence in his decision-making process.

“I just made a mistake. I just don’t understand the league. In hockey, we don’t travel extra people, because we’re not on vacation. We’re here to win, so we don’t want a distraction. The NBA seems to live with those distractions. It’s not how I think about it. So, you’ve got to learn what’s the differences between the two leagues.”

You can argue the upsides of bringing along two-way players, who can't play in the postseason but do practice with the team and sit on the bench. It's good for morale, and it's good to reward guys who got you this far. But the most and really only important thing is that that's just what you do in the NBA—every team does it and always has—and Dundon had no idea. Just straight up made the call without doing any homework on the subject beyond imagining the cost of a couple extra hotel rooms.

This says a few things about Dundon, none of them good. It says he has little curiosity about the team he just purchased. It says he either has no one around him who can explain to him NBA culture, or that he declined to consult them, or that they are afraid to contradict him.

Taken as whole, the interview mostly means that Dundon doesn't intend to spend a penny of his own money toward getting the Blazers a state-of-the-art place to play, not when he can wield the threat of relocation. Right now, the plan is for the city of Portland to spend $600 million to renovate the city-owned Moda Center, and if it won't pay, Dundon intimates there are other cities that will. "We would deal with that if it ever comes up," Dundon said Friday. "But, obviously, we have to solve problems when we have problems." Portland might have problems.