Tom Dundon-led Trail Blazers reportedly lay off around 70 people during spring full of cost cutting

The Portland Trail Blazers had a round of layoffs on Tuesday, according to multiplereports.

The Blazers have been a headline magnet in the first months of Tom Dundon’s ownership, which has been under heavy scrutiny for the cost-cutting measures the 54-year-old Texas billionaire has adopted in Portland. Dundon, who also reportedly slashed expenses after buying the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes in 2017, seemingly hasn’t blinked despite the flak his new organization has received for its unorthodox money-saving tactics down the stretch of the 2025-26 NBA season.

And on Tuesday, according to The Rose Garden Report’s Sean Highkin, around 70 people were let go by the Blazers. That group included longtime team reporter Casey Holdahl, who confirmed his termination with a post on X.

Blazers president Dewayne Hankins characterized Tuesday’s personnel changes as restructuring.

“Today, as part of our plans to position the organization for the future, we made the difficult decision to restructure several areas of the business,” Hankins wrote in a statement, via The Oregonian’s Joe Freeman.

“These changes impacted talented people who have helped shape the Trail Blazers over many years. We are deeply grateful for their contributions, their leadership and the care they showed every day for our team, our fans and the Portland community.”

Hankins also said, per Freeman: “Our focus now is supporting those affected through the transition and positioning the organization for long-term success.”

Last month, Highkin was the first to report that the Blazers were the only team to not send its two-way players on the road for the first weekend of this season’s playoffs. While two-way players — who are on contracts that allow them to split time between the NBA and the G League — aren’t eligible to play in the NBA postseason, it’s customary that they make playoff trips with their NBA teams.

Blazers general manager Joe Cronin took responsibility for that criticized omission, classifying it as a “miscommunication” during an end-of-season news conference in which he tried to set the record straight about Dundon.

Tuesday’s layoffs arrive in the wake of a recent “Game Over” podcast episode that featured Dundon speaking about his perceived frugality.

While talking to hosts Max Kellerman and Rich Paul, Dundon shouldered the blame for Portland not bringing its two-way players to San Antonio for Games 1 and 2 of the Blazers’ first-round series against the Spurs. That playoff series was Portland’s first in five years.

“I just made a mistake. I just don’t understand the league,” Dundon said on the podcast, per The Athletic. “In hockey, we don’t travel [with] extra people because it’s … we’re not on vacation. We’re here to win, so we don’t want the distraction. The NBA seems to live with those distractions. It’s not how I think about it. So, you sort of got to learn, you know, what’s the differences between the two leagues.”

After facing serious backlash, the Blazers flew Caleb Love, Jayson Kent and Chris Youngblood to San Antonio for Game 5 of the series, which the Western Conference finals-bound Spurs won in five games.

But, for the most part, the reputational blowback Dundon’s faced apparently hasn’t influenced his decision-making.

Also last month, reportsdetailed how Blazers staffers were asked to check out of their Phoenix-area hotel rooms hours before the first team bus left for a play-in tournament game versus the Suns so that Portland could avoid late-checkout fees.

In The Athletic’s report, it noted early checkouts were required of all traveling party members, except the team’s players and coaches, and that it was an order from Dundon.

During his podcast appearance with Kellerman and Paul, Dundon doubled down on that controversial cost-cutting measure.

“Normally, when you travel, you get late checkout, right? In this case, in sports, it’s usually like 5% and never comes up. Because it was last-minute going to Phoenix, there was no hotels,” Dundon said.

“So I had trouble getting hotels, and the hotel really wanted us to be out early because they needed the rooms, and so they wanted us to pay for a second night, and so we did that for the coaches and the players, but we got them to let us leave at 1 o’clock.”

Dundon explained that he had a room at the hotel, too, and, like the rest of the traveling party, went down to the hotel ballroom, where, according to the owner, lunch was served at 1:45, 45 minutes after he and the staff had to leave their rooms. Dundon noted that he learned a lot during that hour while talking to team trainers and others.

“I would do it again,” Dundon said. “I think it’s actually pretty stupid to think that people who are there to work, who are being fed 45 minutes later — they weren’t in the lobby, they brought their bags down in the room, right by where the bus was, right next to my bag, and we sat down there and talked. And, you know, if that’s too hard for people, I’m not right for them. I want that culture.”

Cronin defended Dundon in his aforementioned news conference on April 30, describing reports about the Blazers not being willing to pay top dollar for their next full-time head coach as “a little misleading.” Cronin, who became full-time GM in May 2022, told reporters that Portland’s going to pay somebody to fill that role “based on some sort of level of shared risk.”

“If it’s a first-time coach who comes with a lot of risk and doesn’t have a market that we have to necessarily compete in, it’ll be one number,” Cronin said.

“If the coach we’re talking to is a 15-year vet and a future Hall of Famer, it’s going to be a completely different number, and Tom isn’t going to flinch at either of those scenarios.”

At the time, Cronin said there are a bunch of spending fallacies about Dundon, and that he’s confident Dundon will spend to support the Blazers’ players and, by extension, the team’s efforts toward winning.

Tuesday’s report is the latest that’s signaled that others in the organization, however, aren’t being treated the way they once were under the ownership of the late Paul Allen and, ultimately, his sister, Jody.

Time will tell what the Blazers eventually look like under Dundon, but he told Kellerman and Paul that he’s not intending to move the franchise from Portland.

“When I bought the Hurricanes, all I heard was — because I was from Texas — we were going to move the team to Houston,” Dundon said on the podcast. “Moving a team’s difficult. We didn’t move the Hurricanes. We ended up getting a deal done.”

He went on: “We went through the same thing in Portland. Before I even bought the team, I had an agreement with the city and the state. We have an agreement in principle. They’ve already approved half of it. Assuming that all gets done, then this is a non-story.

“For me, it’s never been really a thing. You didn’t buy the team to move it.”