It’s the quiet stretch between free agency and summer league, so let’s time travel backwards twenty years. No, you can’t warn anyone about anything or make any investments, sorry. You just get to reminisce about Portland Trail Blazers history.
We’re traveling back to July 6, 2005. It was a big day, as the team announced the hiring of Seattle SuperSonics legend Nate McMillan as head coach. Blazer’s Edge didn’t quite exist yet (it was coming soon!), but Dave Deckard recapped McMillan’s tenure upon exit. Hundreds of thousands of words have been typed about McMillan. So instead, let’s say a few words about the Blazers-head-coach-that-wasn’t: Marc Iavaroni.
People like to say that the internet never forgets, but we now know that is not true. In fact, a cursory Google search will lie to you: Apparently it has no memory of the reports about Marc Iavaroni in 2005. But don’t fall for it. Iavaroni accidentally plays a tiny-but-memorable role in the history of the Blazers organization and their relationship with the media. However, we can’t use the Oregonian’s web history to find it; we’ll look elsewhere.
Luckily, ESPN has not cleared their archives. Not yet, at least. So we can still see the remnants of the once-ubiquitous TrueHoop coverage from Henry Abbott, where he rolled around numerous basketball blogs to highlight the best of NBA coverage during the glory days of independent writing. On July 6, 2005, he wrote about the Oregonian’s pronouncement of Portland’s new coach, one that longtime Blazers fans remember vividly.
John Canzano more or less predicts that the Blazers will announce the hiring of new head coach Marc Iavaroni in the next few days.
Of course, that didn’t happen. But don’t skip that link above: It features a discussion of why Martell Webster is a better prospect than Gerald Green, and it features a quote that reminds us that basketball organizations say the same things over and over, they just replace the names of the players.
Director of Player Personnel Kevin Pritchard has some strong talk about winning culture.
”We are starting what I like to call our culture,” Pritchard said. “With Sebastian, Travis, Ha and Martell, we are trying to engrain [sic] a new culture here of winning basketball, nothing more, nothing less. This is going to be about playing hard, smart and putting the team first. That’s it. And that starts now.”
A year and a half later, TrueHoop rehashed the Iavaroni incident while discussing the collapsing relations in 2006 between the team and the Oregonian. The Blazers had recently closed workouts from the media after Oregonian’s Jason Quick reported on a private pre-draft visit from Adam Morrison and Rudy Gay, by watching through the edges of the closed blinds in the media work room. This led to a heated column by editor John Canzano, taking the Blazers to task while defending Quick’s actions. In a sign of the level of acrimony, he uses the phrase “personal bootlicker,” and notes that an unnamed Blazers department manager registered the www.johncanzano.com domain name “in an attempt to presumably harrass [sic] me.” Years later, he reported that Blazers President Steve Patterson personally ordered the domain purchase.
The relationship was so fractured, the Oregonian brought in independent journalist Craig Lancaster to research and write about the situation for the paper. That article is also gone, but Abbott interviewed him about it. For those who didn’t follow the Blazers in the mid-2000s, these articles are a must-read into a somewhat-lost portion of team history, where the organization’s relationship with the media (and Canzano) could gently be described as contentious, and everyone involved pointed at each other. TrueHoop cites some of the evidence Lancaster wrote about, noting that both sides might have crossed lines:
Lancaster’s evidence includes the fumbled reporting that Marc Iavaroni would be the next coach, Jason Quick peeking through the blinds of a draft practice (bless him), a Nate McMillan quote about Zach Randolph, and that weird house-for-sale-thing quoted above. But that’s it. There’s a ton missing. No mention, for instance, of the Blazers’ draconian policy of taping every interview they do with reporters. Or the day in and day out coverage, over years, that has certainly left me with the feeling that it’s correct to mistrust and/or hate the Blazers. Please tell me, Mr. Lancaster—does that feeling come from the performance of the Blazers, the performance of the Oregonian’s sports department, or both?
Of course, eventually everything settled down. During all these events, the Blazers drafted Brandon Roy and LaMarcus Aldridge, Paul Allen re-purchased the Rose Garden, and Patterson resigned as team president. Suddenly the mood became upbeat, and the drama moved to a simmer. And while Jason Quick and John Canzano are still around, the media landscape has since changed drastically, both locally and around the league. The Blazers have a relatively similar relationship to the media as many teams in the NBA, for better or worse.
Some smaller things have also been worked out: The media simply can’t see the court from the practice facility’s media workroom now. The team doesn’t require their own recordings anymore. And Patterson quickly ordered the transfer of the www.johncanzano.com domain name to Canzano, who still publishes columns via that URL to this day.
As for Marc Iavaroni, he eventually got his shot, being hired by the Memphis Grizzlies in 2007. He compiled a 33-90 record, while Pau Gasol was traded halfway into his first season. He didn’t finish his second season before getting fired. He never got another shot in the big chair and hasn’t even been an assistant in the league since 2013. Perhaps his coaching trajectory might have been different with Brandon Roy and LaMarcus Aldridge, instead of late-career Damon Stoudamire. Perhaps not. But he’ll always have that picture with Larry Bird.
[Notes: In case the links above are no longer functional later, here are archive.org links to TrueHoop’s coverage: Oregonlive is Busted, but Less Busted Than Before | Blazers vs. Oregonian | Canzano’s heated column: The Blazers Hit a New Low. Also, technically it’s no longer “today” in Blazers history, because some extra research and edits were necessary. I’ll work faster next time.]