http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news;_yl...yhoo&type=lgns
Trail Blazers’ GM could be next to go
By Adrian Wojnarowski, Yahoo! Sports
2 hours, 48 minutes ago
As executives of Vulcan Inc. discussed the pros and cons of firing Portland Trail Blazers general manager Kevin Pritchard last summer, the discussion found its way to this conclusion: Pritchard had proven to be a solid senior-level scout, but largely incapable of running the organization.
Vulcan, the Blazers’ parent company, had watched Pritchard embark upon several selfish and destructive bents, and strong sentiment existed to fire him. Owner Paul Allen and the Vulcan executives no longer trusted him to put the franchise before his own ambitions. The list of transgressions that troubled Vulcan always came back to similar themes: Pritchard’s thirst for public adulation, money and power.
Kevin Pritchard was named general manager of the Blazers by owner Paul Allen three years ago.
(NBAE/Getty Images)
Inside and outside the organization, Pritchard harped on how much more Portland coach Nate McMillan made than him. He complained to friends, rivals and relative acquaintances, and that played an immense part in the gulf that exists between the front office and coach.
When negotiations became contentious with star Brandon Roy(notes), Pritchard didn’t stand firm with the limits of ownership’s offer. What’s more, Pritchard tried to cozy up to Roy by selling the notion that it was the two of them together trying to get the contracts they deserved from owner Paul Allen. For the unparalleled resources Allen has provided Pritchard to remake the roster – millions in dollars to purchase draft picks, packaging them in trades or stockpiling prospects overseas – Vulcan was beyond irate that Pritchard still couldn’t present a united front when Allen decided to make a financial stand.
It reeked of Pritchard’s desperation and immaturity, and eventually inspired team president Larry Miller to usurp Pritchard in the talks for Roy’s eventual five-year, $82 million deal. Pritchard would go around the NBA, and surprise peers with questions that included, “How much do you make?” before launching into diatribes about how he couldn’t understand why he was so poorly compensated in Portland, especially in comparison to McMillan.
Allen and Vulcan ultimately decided to strip some power and autonomy from Pritchard, but decided to keep trotting him out to the things he most loved: news conferences and public appearances.
“They left him the public face, but essentially he was neutered,” a league source with direct knowledge of the talks said.
Privately, Vulcan executives wish they had gone further and fired him, sources say. That now appears to be a matter of time, especially with the way Pritchard’s agent, Warren LeGarie, has publicly gone ballistic on the Blazers organization. After Miller pushed to fire assistant GM Tom Penn after a recent nasty, personal exchange in Portland – the culmination of resentment that lingered from a contract leverage ploy with Minnesota – Pritchard finds himself isolated within the organization and devoid of allies.
Since Penn’s firing, LeGarie has encouraged Pritchard to resign, sources say. Pritchard contemplated the possibility, but has ultimately decided to go in a completely different direction. Pritchard has requested a meeting with Vulcan officials, and is expected to speak with them this week.
After several days of scorched earth by his agent, sources say Pritchard is desperate to find a way to save his job. After months of listening to LeGarie tell him he’d be in great demand on the market, Pritchard is finding that might not be the truth.
“Pritch has figured out that all those jobs that Warren promised him aren’t there,” one GM said.
Yes, Pritchard had lost his support within Vulcan, and LeGarie’s public assailing of Allen and franchise officials has only deepened the resolve within the Blazers to fire him. Miller has increased his influence on the basketball side over the past year, including taking a prominent role not only in the Roy and LaMarcus Aldridge(notes) talks, but he also has become involved in much smaller matters, like ironing out a deal for second-round draft pick Patty Mills.
In some ways, Miller, a former Nike executive, has started work on the job. Miller’s plan is to hire a GM, but still keep a strong hand in the day-to-day basketball operations.
“The transition away from this regime has already started,” one source with knowledge of ownership’s plans said.
Looking back, maybe Allen should’ve just let Pritchard leave for the Minnesota Timberwolves when he wanted to go interview with them. Pritchard wanted to talk with them, a source close to him says, but Allen refused to grant permission. Pritchard and LeGarie hatched a plan to push Penn for the job, who never seriously considered taking it. After all, the control of basketball operations in Minnesota belongs to the owner’s son-in-law, Rob Moor, who acts as team president.
Once Penn leveraged Minnesota for an offer to take back to Portland, league sources say the three of them – LeGarie, Pritchard and Penn – exaggerated the package and control offered Penn as GM. Still, Portland gave Penn a raise and a new contract. For a brief time, this thrilled Pritchard. He believed this was a way to backdoor into a new deal for himself. If Vulcan had taken care of his assistant, they would feel compelled to take care of him.
Only, Vulcan told him to get lost. Portland ownership had already spoken with Minnesota’s team president and believed it had been duped into an excessive deal for Penn. This is business as usual with LeGarie. It wouldn’t be long until LeGarie became combative with Portland ownership, and all broke loose in the past week when the agent went public with columnist John Canzano of The Oregonian.
Now, LeGarie has overplayed Pritchard’s hand in Portland, ripped his bosses, and here’s Pritchard’s dilemma: Does he stand strong with LeGarie on his scorched-earth policy, or dump the agent and throw himself upon Allen’s mercy?
Through it all, here was the most fatal flaw of Pritchard: He let himself be convinced that ownership would value him on par with McMillan. It isn’t the case. With Vulcan’s offices in Seattle, most executives have a long history and respect for McMillan back to his coaching and playing days with the Sonics. So far, McMillan has been unwilling to sign a contract extension past the 2011 season, but that would likely change with Pritchard out of the picture.
McMillan is a dutiful pro, never interested in intramural politics or fighting battles behind the scenes. He has been around the league a long time, and privately never believed that Pritchard’s DNA showed staying power.
“Kevin was in a constant battle to position himself to get credit away from Nate for whatever success they were eventually going to have there,” one NBA executive friendly with both said. “Nate knows enough not to flap his gums and pound his chest – especially when your team hasn’t even won a playoff series yet. He’s secure in himself, in a way that Pritchard never knew how to be.
“If Kevin just kept his mouth shut, cut out all the arrogance and insecurity, I think he probably would’ve had his extension a long time ago.”
That article makes Pritch seem like a complete bag and his agent even worse.
LOL at everyone sucking this guy's like he was some genius GM for years, only to find out he's an incompetent ass. He's like the NBA's answer to Alan Greenspan.
Durant > Anyone who's ever played for the Blazers. Maybe not yet, but someday.
Wojnarowski's a -head. He's written a number of articles critical of Pritchard. Penis envy or something similar.
Pritchard going down in flames brings a smile to my face. Even when times were good, it was hard for Portland to hide how much of an asshat he is.
Yeah, Things like this make you look like a ."Team Presidents and General Managers,
'The Portland Trail Blazers are aware that certain teams may be contemplating signing Darius Miles to a contract for the purpose of adversely impacting the Portland Trail Blazers Salary Cap and tax positions. Such conduct from a team would violate its fiduciary duty as an NBA joint venturer.
In addition, persons or en ies involved in such conduct may be individually liable to the Portland Trail Blazers for tortuously interfering with the Portland Trail Blazers' contract rights and perspective economic opportunities. 'Please be aware that if a team engages in such conduct, the Portland Trail Blazers will take all necessary steps to safeguard its rights, including, without limitation, litigation.'"
Pritchard was good for the comedic value he brought to the rest of the league. Who could ever forget this one?
Until now, Portland Trail Blazers general manager Kevin Pritchard had a secret it appears most of the NBA hadn’t taken the time to discover for itself: Darius Miles is on the brink of blowing up the Blazers’ salary-cap space.
Most of the NBA believed Miles still was eight regular-season games away from devastating the Blazers’ salary cap, but Yahoo! Sports learned on Wednesday that Miles is just two games away.
Teams had been under the impression that the league’s collective bargaining agreement demanded that Miles play 10 regular-season or postseason games for the $18 million – which is split evenly between this and next season – to return to the Blazers’ payroll.
All along, the Blazers knew exactly that the preseason games counted, but a league official said Wednesday night, “He wanted to keep it quiet.”
Apparently, no team had called the league for clarification on the rule that states the season is cons uted by the “first day of training camp and ending immediately after the last game of the NBA Finals.”
The league office confirmed to Yahoo! Sports that the six preseason games that Miles played for the Boston Celtics counts toward the 10. Before the Memphis Grizzlies waived him on Tuesday night to avoid guaranteeing his contract for the rest of the season, Miles played two regular-season games that pushed him to eight total.
Then he goes out and sends a letter to every team in the NBA that Portland will sue if they play him. HAHAHAHAHAHAH Yes he is an Assclown.
Good times for Portland;
Pritch sounds like an asshat, but he is a pretty damn good GM from talent/move making prospective.
+1
The hubris that emanated from Oregon in the last few years has been pretty much unbearable.
Funny stuff. he is good at ACQUIRING young talent.
But NOT at building a roster in to a team.
I know a lot of people argue just take the best player avaialable... which i do agree with in cases like Durant over Oden (which of course he actually went against his baser instincts)...
but having 6 wings that are capable of starting ...
or 4 guards who all need the ball to be effective ... is just plain dumb ...
Trade some of those guys for quality stars ...Fernandez bayless roy is a lot of redundancy on the roster ...
You're ing nuts! The ONLY reason we're not challenging the Lakers for the #1 seed in the Western Conference is injuries. We've had the 2nd most missed games due to injury of any team in the NBA. And YET...we're still heading to the playoffs! How is that possible??? I'll tell you how...it's through building a quality team, that's how. I can't wait until we're healthy next year and we beat the out of all you pretenders!
Next year? We have 500.00 on the table when the Lakers wipe the hardwood with your boys in the first round and without Bynum at that.... THIS YEAR!
Gotta agree with tlong here... Injuries are Porty's main problem, not the team makeup. In sports, history is written by the winners... which usually means history is written by the healthy. Teams like Porty get dissed unfairly IMO.
On the other hand, the cries of "Wait til next year!!1!!!" out of Porty are starting to get a little old.
You must have missed the thread where I nullified the bet. Bummer.Next year? We have 500.00 on the table when the Lakers wipe the hardwood with your boys in the first round and without Bynum at that.... THIS YEAR!
Last I looked it was this:
Now I guess you are backing out yet again. All talk...
Oh shut the up cobbler.
If Prtichard was such a great TALENT EVALUATOR he wouldn't have stupidly passed on Durant for an over-hyped old man.
No denying the quality of talent assembled. But Portland did the SAME thing with the Jailblazers of LAST decade ...acquired a lot of redundant talent no TRUE top shelf superstar (though Id take Roy over any player on THOSE squads) and we saw where tTHAT got them not even a single le appearance.
True Portland has been hurt ...but is it not Pritchard 's fault that he picked the oft injured center over the young scoring stud ...much like the Blazers did with Bowie over MJ? Granted durant is no Joirdan but at this point Oden is not even as good as Sam Bowie ...
And even if you say the Blazers future is bright ...I think OKC's even brighter ...instead of going for redunancy by taking another two guard SF or PF the past two years they filled holes with talent but was NOT duplicated on their roster.
If healthy I bet the Blazers are better than the Thunder (next year)but long-term prospects I'd take OKC's "stock" over the Blazers. Durant will be better thn Roy soon if not already and Westbrook is better than any other player on the Blazers not named Roy ...iINCLUDING Aldridge ...
Blazers were overrated even when they were healthy. I wanted them in the playoffs LAST year and look forward to busting their ass this year and next ...
Portland drafts talent and falls in love with and instead of using them as chips to improve the team ...they wait to long and dont get good value in return ...
ouuuuuuch..... just trying to give you some boasts to live up to tlongII. If you want to back out, I understand. I would too if I was rooting for the Blazers. Besides, you have to get there first. And I'm talking playoffs not parade.
Damn. I always thought of ard as a bag, but after reading this article, he's much more of a petty, jealous, immature than I could have imagined.
Talking openly about salaries, backstabbing your coach, not demonstrating a united front with ownership, who pays your salary? There's no wonder the kid has few allies.
Good luck trying to save your job, kid. And get over yourself.
Portland has enough high level talent to win a le in the next few years. As per usual, people are being reactionary. I'll just be happy that if they win, it's not going to be with the arrogant Pritchard at the helm. It's nice to see Portland's ownership, FO and fans eating some humble pie.
Pritchard's mistake was requesting the injury exception for Miles instead of keeping him and using his expiring contract as a trade bait. Having only RLEC + talented underpaid with very small contracts young players was a bad combination to get something done in the trade market. Mind you most fans, including those now criticizing Portland's FO, were in love with the way they rebuild, "youth power" and stuff. Only shows how short-sighted are most fans.
Pritchard’s On-Court Results Not Enough to Keep the Bosses Happy
SportingNews
Kevin Pritchard has been a darling of the mainstream media and blogosphere for years for his shrewd deal-making on draft day and uncanny ability to identify undervalued players and prospects. To an outsider, everything appeared hunky-dory in Portland, with the Blazers and Pritchard well on their way to adding more pieces to the core they hope can lead them to a championship.
So it came as something of a surprise when reports surfaced last week that Pritchard is likely on his way out of Portland. Tom Penn, his chief lieutenant, has already been let go, and everything indicates that Pritchard is essentially alone in the organization. How did he go from widely acknowledged front office savior to black sheep?
Adrian Wojnarowski helped shed some light on the situation Monday, and he paints a picture of Pritchard as an ego-driven man with obvious skills as a scout but little idea how to run the organization:
Vulcan, the Blazers’ parent company, had watched Pritchard embark upon several selfish and destructive bents, and strong sentiment existed to fire him. Owner Paul Allen and the Vulcan executives no longer trusted him to put the franchise before his own ambitions. The list of transgressions that troubled Vulcan always came back to similar themes: Pritchard’s thirst for public adulation, money and power.
Inside and outside the organization, Pritchard harped on how much more Portland coach Nate McMillan made than him. He complained to friends, rivals and relative acquaintances, and that played an immense part in the gulf that exists between the front office and coach.
The worst instance mentioned in the column involves Pritchard siding with Brandon Roy during the player’s contract talks last year, claiming that they were both getting stiffed by Allen and Vulcan as a whole.
Again, this was a surprise. Pritchard has always been smooth in interviews, makes the right decisions in free agency and the draft, and explains his reasoning at every step of the way. He projects calm and firm decision-making and is certainly more sympathetic than an organization that sounds like a Bond villain.
However, the public-facing acts of a general manager are just a portion of the position’s responsibilities—he is, in effect, in charge of managing people and maintaining strong relations with the rest of the franchise. Perhaps Woj’s article relied on sources antagonistic to Pritchard, but the facts remain: He’s run afoul of Vulcan by seeking the public limelight to a degree deemed improper by his bosses. Pritchard is the public face of the front office, but he’s not the boss. Transactions and rumors have become a cottage industry unto themselves, and they’ve often come to stand in for the entire job of general manager.
General managers and personnel men are often let go for reasons unrelated to the decisions they actually make. For instance, take Chris Mullin in Golden State, who corrected his early missteps with a series of cost-cutting trades and brought in Don Nelson to lead the team to the playoffs, only to be shunned by the rest of the organization when his relationships started going sour. And while this is only an educated guess, perhaps terrible decision-makers like Billy King and Kevin McHale managed to hold on to their jobs for so long simply because people liked them.
Pritchard wasn’t so friendly, though, and now the Blazers are in limbo. The core of Roy, LaMarcus Aldridge, and Greg Oden has always been the group expected to bring Portland their first championship in more than 30 years. Oden’s injuries have obviously thrown a wrench into those plans, but that has nevertheless been Pritchard’s group. The same goes for European players he maneuvered to acquire like Rudy Fernandez and Nicolas Batum. All of these players are effective and coveted by franchises around the league. The question now is what happens to them if Pritchard leaves this summer. If these are "his guys," will Vulcan try to erase much of his impact on the organization.
That would be a shame. Because unlike many cases of deposed GMs, Pritchard’s problem hasn’t come in on-court results. There are no personnel moves to fix, just broken relationships in the front office.
Vulcan logic has GM Kevin Pritchard's job in jeopardy
http://blog.oregonlive.com/behindbla...n_logic_h.html
Near the end of what had been a long Monday for Kevin Pritchard, the suddenly embattled Trail Blazers general manager found solace in a note passed on to him from his church pastor:
Misery is a choice.
Choose peace.
"I'm choosing peace," Pritchard said softly late Monday night. "It's going to be all right. It's going to be all right."
I'm not so sure things are going to end up OK with the Blazers.
But I am sure Kevin Pritchard is in trouble.
And honestly, I can't believe I just wrote that sentence.
Because it is unfathomable that the man who played a major role in transforming the Blazers from the NBA's worst team on and off the court, into what is today one of the best examples in pro sports of a franchise that can win while valuing character, is in jeopardy of losing his job.
But anybody who knows Pritchard, and was there to hear him fend off 15 minutes of rapid-fire questions, could sense Monday that something is terribly amiss with this franchise.
And Pritchard all but confirmed during the awkward and tense exchange that he fears for his job.
By now, there has been so much speculation, "sources" and stories about what is going on inside the Trail Blazers front offices that one can go dizzy from all the angles and accusations being explored.
All anyone knows for sure is that Tom Penn, the vice president for basketball operations and Pritchard's right-hand man, was fired last week for "philosophical differences."
Outside of that, it's a bunch of no-name sources making wild accusations that Pritchard is power-hungry and trying to leverage owner Paul Allen into a new contract. That Pritchard and coach Nate McMillan don't get along. That Penn had a shouting match with team president Larry Miller before being fired. And remarkably enough, that Penn had the gall to call Allen a "liar" to his face.
And about the only thing everyone in the Blazers offices can agree on is that none of the stories has been accurate.
But the biggest shockwaves in a week's worth of stories has been the insinuation that Pritchard's job is at stake, famously fueled by the blowhard agent for both Pritchard and Penn, Warren LeGarie. It was LeGarie who told John Canzano of The Oregonian that Penn's firing was just a "drive-by" shooting.
So what we've had for the past five days has been wild speculation, veiled accusations and con uous hibernation from Pritchard.
On Monday, with a manufactured media availability, it was the perfect chance for the organization to back the man who is beloved within the walls of the Blazers basketball facility. After all, Pritchard has as much street-cred with the Blazers fan base as team star Brandon Roy.
But only McMillan, reached later in the evening, backed Pritchard.
"I think ... no, I don't think, I know Kevin has done a very good job," McMillan said. "And I know that there are no problems or issues between me and him whatsoever. To go as far as to say he will be fired? I don't see it."
Miller had the same chance to support Pritchard earlier in the day. You know, say something along the lines of "I back Kevin, and I want him to be our GM for the future."
Instead, we got a bunch of nonsense from Miller about process and procedure.
After more than 10 years of covering this team for this newspaper, this development would go down as one of the strangest and dumbest I've encountered.
All of this reeks heavily of a certain Western Conference general manager who is widely known to envy this job. He happens to have experience with the workings of the Vulcans. He has been on a constant smear campaign since Pritchard took over, harboring feelings that Pritchard "gloats" about his success, "rubbing it in the nose" of colleagues.
If some want to tout that source as credible, and not recognize the motives, that's on them. And if Vulcan wants to play that way, then maybe this isn't the place for Pritchard after all.
If anything has become clear to me over the past week it's this: Anyone under Kevin Pritchard in this organization loves him and swears by him. Anyone over him appears uncomfortable with him or threatened by him.
Is it because the Blazers fan base reveres him so strongly? Or is it because there are people who think he gets too much credit? Or are there simply too many people making decisions in the organization?
It's hard to say. Paul Allen and his Vulcan company has never been an easy bunch to figure out.
That's why Pritchard is done commiserating. He says he has found peace. And that peace, fittingly, comes in hunkering down to battle for his job.
"I'm going to fight to be the GM of this team," Pritchard said. "I'm totally committed to doing what's best for this organization. And I do mean it when I say this is a good organization. There are good people in place. They know I'm hooked here, because I love the guys. I really do."
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