Bert Kolde, Trail Blazers Miss The Mark Yet Again with Broadcasting Firings.

750 THE GAME STAFF

If you have watched Trail Blazers basketball over the years — whether on KGW, Comcast Sports Net Northwest, NBC Sports Northwest, and now Root Sports — you have probably grown familiar with many of the names and faces responsible for putting the team’s on-court product on television.

In that time, that on-court product has oscillated between being fleetingly hopeful and exciting to being painful to watch. Look no further than the tank jobs each of the past two seasons.

With a plethora of issues on the court for the franchise to address, instead, leadership opted for personnel changes in the broadcasting department.

Jeff Curtin, Director of Broadcasting, was let go, as were longtime producers Dan Hyatt and Nick Livingston.

 


John Canzano addressed the moves on 750 The Game.

“This is an organization that needs to be focused on the basketball,” Canzano said. “Needs to be focused on improving the product. Needs to be focused on improving the customer experience inside the arena. Winning local fans back over. And now seems consumed with gutting the broadcast production staff, just a year after the team announced, ‘Hey, our broadcasters are not going to go on the road’, and then they backpedaled and backed off that after some public blowback. What is going on with the Blazers?”

Bert Kolde, Vice Chair of the Trail Blazers, is considered by many to be the driving force behind the firings at Blazers Broadcasting.

“Frankly, [Kolde] is a guy who had the good fortune of being Paul Allen’s roommate in college and has parlayed that into wrecking organizations and meddling and whispering in the ear of general managers. And now that Paul has passed away, unfortunately, Bert has got a stranglehold on the organization. His fingerprints are all over this thing.”

Canzano said he is not entirely sure why Kolde, who is Seattle-based, would make these changes to Blazers Broadcasting. Is this a move to go on the cheap? Migrate production to Root Sports?

“I don’t know what he’s trying to do,” admitted Canzano. “But I can tell you, it’s another reminder that the Blazers organization has its eye off the ball. It literally has its eye off the ball.

“Why, for the life of me, I cannot understand, why this organization just over and over, just repeats mistakes. Just repeats the meddling mistakes. The rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic. ‘Oh, let’s redo the logo; oh, let’s paint Moda Center, oh, let’s…’ — Fix the basketball, for crying out loud.”

Listen to Canzano’s opinion on the Trail Blazers and the news out of Blazers Broadcasting at the top of the show on the podcast below. And don’t miss John Canzano deliver the Bald Faced Truth afternoons 3-6 p.m. exclusively in Portland on 750 The Game.

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