It's only an issue if those sponsorships are impossible to get in Portland. Otherwise, it's an opportunity for revenue growth, which I suspect is one of the reasons Dundon bought the team in the first place. The Blazers were an attractive team to buy because they were valued in the bottom third of the league, but with clear room to improve the bottom line with smarter management. A lot of the measures Dundon is taking are very common for an outside group taking over a business that has become bloated and inefficient over decades from a previous owner. Anyone who follows the finance page will often see hand-wringing when a new group takes over and the first thing they do is cut the work force. That hand-wringing is often accompanied by wild attempts from the media to act like the whole company is going down in flames. Look at when Musk bought twitter: the media over and over depicted him as someone who didn't know what he was doing, that he was ruining the company, that he was losing all his sponsors, and that his financing was going to fall through or banks that lent to him were going to lose all their money because his debt had no demand in the market. All of this turned out not to be true. He cut the labor force in half and the company runs far more efficiently now, the sponsors came back, and the banks were able to sell his debt at the same initial company valuation of $44 billion without a problem. Those same media writers still have their jobs despite being completely wrong about everything, just like Canzano still has a job, because there is no accountability for media saying dumb things.squintsdd wrote: Tue Jul 28, 2026 7:53 pm
Fat profit or not, it's an issue when they were quite literally the only team without a sponsorship.
Dundon knows the Blazers will be winning more in future years, because it actually isn't that hard for a smart owner to run an NBA team better than the Blazers have been run the past 20 years. I have spelled this out many times on this site: If you manage the cap well and stay disciplined in signing players, not giving in to demands like Lillard made all those years for ridiculous contracts when his production didn't merit it, or making stupid FOMO signings like Evan Turner, Jeramie Grant, Anfernee Simons, etc. you will eventually end up with a more talented and deeper team with contracts that perform better. This leads to more revenue from playoffs, sponsorships, tickets, etc. He just has to have the resolve to ride through the idiots in the media the same way Elon did. Improvement on the court is not a hope, it is a certainty barring a slew of catastrophic injuries. It just takes discipline that Olshey and Cronin never had.
