There is a moment, in the final scene of “Animal House,” that perfectly captures the circus that has been the Portland Trail Blazers over the past week.
As Delta House sabotages the homecoming parade and a riot ensues, Kevin Bacon stands there screaming, “REMAIN CALM! ALL IS WELL!”
He gets trampled by the panicked crowd, which must be kind of how Larry Miller and Paul Allen are feeling these days.
Because while the Blazers’ front office haphazardly attempted to calm the masses last week, they might as well have been telling fans to bend over and say, “Thank you, sir, may I have another?”
Portland’s mismanagement of the Kevin Pritchard situation has been so rife with missteps and miscalculations that you can’t help but think Dean Wormer is in charge.
Fire Pritchard? Nah, just put him on double-secret probation and be done with it.
On Monday, Pritchard made a public plea to keep his job. Why there should be any need to do so has not yet been explained.
Here is the guy who traded Randy Foye and Tyrus Thomas for Brandon Roy and LaMarcus Aldridge — on the same day. The guy who traded Joey Dorsey and Darrell Arthur for Nicolas Batum. The guy who landed Marcus Camby at the trade deadline this year.
And if he screwed up the Kevin Durant-Greg Oden draft, so what? Let’s give the Blazers Durant, Foye, Thomas, Dorsey and Arthur and see how they do. With the team Pritchard has constructed, they’re doing just fine.
All of which is painfully obvious to the populace. So when the Blazers fired Tom Penn, Pritchard’s right-hand man, and Pritchard’s agent said the general manager would be next, well, it nearly inspired a riot in the streets.
Either that, or a toga party.
Yet the response from the front office has been worthless and weak.
“Well, the reality is, the way this organization has worked and the way most organizations have worked is, you’ve got to get to the end of the season and you evaluate what’s gone on,” Miller, the team president, said Monday.
Allen, the team owner, then waited three days before releasing a statement that included: “I support everyone who works for me, including Kevin Pritchard, and that’s why he’s our general manager.”
In the art of public relations, neither of these statements does much to relate to the public. That has fueled a grass-roots Internet flare-up — as well as numerous signs and T-shirts in the crowd at Thursday’s game against Dallas — in support of Pritchard.
Allen’s tepid support was particularly distressing.
By waiting to say anything, he created a vacuum that was naturally filled with conjecture and speculation and rumor, and then he did nothing to calm it. If you’re running a business that is dependent upon public perception, that’s no way to go through life, son.
So, yes, the Blazers will wait until after the season to evaluate everybody in the organization. That has been made abundantly clear, although it probably sounds perplexing to Tom Penn.
Perhaps the Blazers had good reason to fire Penn. Legally, they can’t say, although The Columbian reported Friday that Penn’s official termination notice indicated the firing was without cause.
But none of that should have stopped Allen and Miller from being supportive of Pritchard.
None of that should have stopped them from saying, “We’ll evaluate at the end of the year, but he sure did a great job of fleecing Minnesota to get Brandon Roy a couple years ago.”
By failing to squash the possibility that Pritchard will be fired, Allen has indicated that he’s spending too much time listening to non-basketball people. You know, the kind of who would place too much stock in the Durant-Oden draft and not enough in Pritchard’s evaluation of Batum.
Allen’s response, or lack thereof, has been particularly tone deaf to the will of the fans, and it renews questions about whether he provides any benefits for the franchise other than having a lot of money and a willingness to spend it.
And by leaving open the door that suggests Pritchard likely will be fired, Allen has done nothing to calm the masses who threaten to overrun him.
