It’s probably the most savage attack on Kevin Pritchard and the Blazers you’re going to read anywhere. This guy is plugged in to the NBA, I’d say, because a lot of what he’s saying is the same stuff I’ve been hearing from people I know who work around the league. Here are a few samples of what you’ll read:
The bully-boy bluff ends now because the Portland Trail Blazers always were without the guts to file a lawsuit over Darius Miles. Their threatening email had been a desperate final act of a franchise awash in arrogance. Blazers officials hoped the threat of Paul Allen’s riches could scare the NBA. Mostly, it made everyone laugh.
And this:
From leaked drug tests and public proclamations of private medical records to trashing Miles to rival executives and daring to claim him off waivers to stash him away on the inactive list, Portland’s front office acted in bad form and bad faith. Yes, the Jail Blazers lived again.
And this:
The irony of it all, of course, is that Miles has turned into an improbable teacher to the Blazers, giving them some lessons on professionalism and humility. Yes, he had been immature for most of his career. He had made terrible mistakes. Only now, he has grown up. After having him with the Celtics in the preseason, the Boston Celtics’ Danny Ainge and Doc Rivers believe it. So does more and more of the league now.
Through it all, Miles never wished ill will on Portland. His comeback never has been about costing them salary-cap space on his injury retirement case. Management wanted out of his $48 million contract in Portland and found a way. All along, Miles told the Blazers he would try to play again. He honored his word.
And the better he has looked, the worse it has reflected on Portland GM Kevin Pritchard. As much as anyone, this mess has exposed him. He wanted to be the star in the good times in Portland, wanted all the bouquets and bows for his work on the job. He started to believe his own clippings, his own mythology, and he thought he could get away with anything.
From the start, Pritchard stumbled into the one rabid NBA market where a general manager can aspire to celebrity. Portland declared Pritchard the Golden Boy, the Gambler, and played songs about him on the radio. Never once did he seem embarrassed. Never did he do much but furiously feed the rush to declare him a genius.
He bragged of draining three cell-phone batteries a day. He bought high-risk stocks, and he never laid up on a par-5. He loves those little details about himself getting into the papers. True? Who knows? It sure made for a fast-rising legend, though. He wanted everyone to believe that he worked harder and longer and smarter. Maybe he thought it all portrayed a confidence, but it mostly masked an insecurity.
And this to end it:
Portland owner Paul Allen gave Pritchard the biggest stack of chips to bring to the table, and Pritchard flaunted them to everyone. He stockpiled draft choices like Reagan did nuclear warheads, buying up millions of dollars worth of picks from cash-strapped teams over the past several seasons. He never has been afraid to rub that advantage into the faces of his peers. The Blazers still haven’t been to the playoffs under him, but any opposing GM on the wrong side of a deal with Portland is considered to have been Pritch-slapped.
It’s strange, but every transaction in Portland has been treated like a validation of Pritchard’s genius. Now, his apologists are blaming Paul Allen and president Larry Miller for the Miles mess, only it doesn’t work like that. Pritchard is the face of the franchise because he made it that way.
Pritchard has mismanaged the Miles situation from the beginning. Once the league doctor agreed that Miles’ knee injury was a career-ender, Pritchard’s dubious intentions came tumbling out of him.
“Two doctors said Darius had the worst microfracture injury they had ever seen,” he publicly said. “They would never have him play basketball, and the odds of having knee replacement surgery [are] high. I hear that, and as a general manager, I didn’t want it on my conscience – that I had a kid have to go through a knee replacement surgery.
“That’s a pretty major surgery. They saw [two bones] and replace [the knee]. It’s a bad deal.”
His conscience, huh? Those were words directed at the rest of the league, trying to tell every other team that Miles was too far gone for them to consider bringing back. He must have believed people were stupid. All around the NBA, it made everyone think: Pritchard sounds scared that Miles isn’t done at all. Why else would he be trying so hard to convince everyone otherwise?
Bad enough that Pritchard spoke out of turn on a player’s medical condition and possibly violated privacy laws, but it was clear that a campaign to frighten away potential teams was under way. From there, it went underground. If the Blazers couldn’t scare people on Miles’ knee, it wasn’t long, league executives say, until Portland turned to his character.
Pritchard has a great eye for talent, but that’s just the start of constructing a contender, a champion. The greats of his profession understand the humbling nature of the job – genius today, bum tomorrow – and mostly stay in the shadows, deflecting praise on coaches and players. Once you try to make yourself the star in the good times, you’re asking for trouble when they go bad. So now, his hubris has been Pritch-slapped into silence, and maybe in the long run, it’s the best thing that could’ve happened to the Blazers. Maybe they needed this sobering reminder of reality.
Portland loses cap space now, and it loses some respect. All that arrogance, all those threats and a 27-year-old that Kevin Pritchard and his posse had dismissed as character-free, as the last holdout of the Jail Blazers, taught them a lesson.
Yes, the Jail Blazers made a comeback this season.
Only this time, they wore suits.
The people I know in the league never begrudged Portland’s attempt to get Miles’ salary off their cap. Any team, believing a player was washed up, would have done the same. Where the problem began was the piling on — the extra attempts by the Blazers, both public and private, to discourage other teams from taking a chance on him. I pointed out in a newspaper column months ago that Pritchard’s comments on Miles’ physical condition were possible violations of the player’s medical rights. Pritchard’s remarks were taken by many teams as an attempt to discourage them from taking a chance on Miles.
Remember, the undertone of all the things coming out of Portland about Miles was that he was out of shape. Fat. He had poor character. He’d be getting his money, anyway, and without that incentive he would NEVER work hard enough in his rehab to get back on an NBA court. But that was not the case.
Just yesterday I got a call from a friend who works for another franchise who was still shaking his head in disbelief. “Man, that e-mail they sent out put them in line for being accused of anti-trust violations,” he said. “Not to mention how bad it made them look. You can’t keep someone from trying to get a job. What could they have been thinking about?”
Look, the Blazers’ only course here is to put this behind them and learn from it. And I pass it along so that fans of the team understand that the opinions Adrian Wojnarowski shared in that Yahoo column aren’t conjured up in some drug-induced haze. They are the prevailing opinion around the NBA, as near as I can tell.
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Tags: Add new tag, Adrian Wojnarowski, Darius Miles, Dwight Jaynes, Kevin Pritchard, Portland Trail Blazers
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