LOS ANGELES — The Texas billionaire stepped out of the limelight of the most dazzling arena in basketball and into a concrete hallway.
On the day he became the new owner of the Trail Blazers, Tom Dundon, who had just watched his $4.25 billion investment surge to a double-digit halftime lead in the most meaningful game of the season, slipped into a small suite filled with plates of sushi and fruit and assorted cheeses.
“You want anything?” Dundon asked, bending over to open a small refrigerator.
Well, yeah. As a matter of fact, I do. Not an Izze soda, though, or a water.
How about some answers?
He pulled out a chair and sat down.
“You can ask me whatever you want,” Dundon told me.
Are you the hard-ass everybody says you are?
“I think so,” he said.
Should people be scared of you? Should Trail Blazers employees be scared?
“Well,” he said, chewing a strawberry down to its white rind, “it’s just, you know, my expectations are consistently unrealistic. I want people that like that. If that’s not the environment you thrive in, then it’s going to be hard.”
Then, the $600 million question: Are you committed to keeping the team in Portland?
“I’ve literally spent no time on that,” he said. “We’re working on this funding package and working on the lease and that’s the only thing anybody’s ever done. Because you have this thing right in front of you and I’m assuming that’s going to get done.”
Dundon, who also owns the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes, is talking about the multi-government funding package that has been stoked by the implicit threat that the team could relocate without a $600 million investment in renovating the 31-year-old Moda Center. The state has committed to $365 million, with the city of Portland — which has owned the arena since 2024 — and Multnomah County working to scare up the rest.
If all those public dollars come through, does that take relocation off the table?
“Of course,” Dundon said with a no-duh wince.
So, there it was.
The long-awaited pledge from the new steward of Portland’s most precious civic asset. And we should all hold him to it.
Because it should be lost on no one that the hard-driving Dundon, who watched the Blazers trounce the Clippers 114-104 at Intuit Dome to move within a half-game of eighth in the Western Conference play-in race, did not sport any Blazers gear for his first game as the team’s owner.
He wore gray sweats and, notably, a throwback Hartford Whalers ball cap.
The Whalers, of course, are the team that famously relocated from New England to Carolina.
Now, Dundon was not the owner who moved the Whalers and made them the Hurricanes. He didn’t buy into the NHL until 2017. But as subtle symbols of irony go, this was certainly one.
Nothing is permanent.
Dundon’s first day on the job was a head-spinning whirlwind of activity. He joined the team in Los Angeles, rode the team bus to the Blazers’ morning shoot around along with co-owner owner Sheel Tyle, then grilled various members of the team’s traveling party in a series of one-on-one interviews. He and Tyle took a tour of the two-year-old Intuit Dome that was guided by Clippers president Gillian Zucker then flew back to Portland on the team’s charter.
It was a jarring departure in style from the outgoing Jody Allen, who sent a farewell note to Blazers staffers Tuesday, calling it “her honor to serve as the chair of the team since Paul’s passing” and praising Dundon’s passion.
“I will be cheering you all from the sidelines for years to come,” Allen wrote.
Sitting four rows behind the Blazers bench next to Tyle and Panda Express co-founder Andrew Cherng, another co-owner, Dundon crossed his legs and impassively rested a hand on his cheek as his team built a double-digit lead behind 30 first-half points from Deni Avdija and Toumani Camara.
He only pulled his cell phone from his pocket during timeouts. And during some breaks in action, got up from his seat and walked three rows back to lean in and pepper to general manager Joe Cronin with thoughts on the game.
“He challenges you,” Blazers interim head coach Tiago Splitter said. “Every decision you make he asks you why. … But very intense. He wants to understand, he wants to learn how we do everything. How we think about basketball. What’s the process? I think that’s how he became successful. He wants to do the same in basketball.”
If the Blazers are to be a reflection of their new owner, they were on Tuesday by not taking their foot off the gas. When the Clippers tried to stage a comeback in the third quarter, they withstood the surge and pushed the lead back 17.
“I am not flexible about my standards,” Dundon said at halftime.
He arrives with a reputation of cutting costs. Of being cheap, even, on everything except for the roster. He outright denied a rumor that has circulated through NBA circles that Splitter has already rejected a contract extension that was deemed a low-ball offer.
On Tuesday, his first day on the job, Dundon put it all back on the players, praising their talent and pointing to their performance against the Clippers.
It was fitting, perhaps, that for a long-floundering franchise the most meaningful game in years coincided with the arrival of new leadership at the very top of the organization.
“I think the main thing,” Dundon said, “is just raising the expectations. … How do we get more?”
It will be an exhilarating, if perhaps uncomfortable, ride for Blazers employees and fans as Dundon attempts to answer that primary question.
Just so long as the Portland Trail Blazers logo doesn’t become one Dundon sports out of nostalgia years down the line.
