NYT Article on Hawks Ownership (who the f- is Tommy Dortch?)

[Guest]

Nzinga Shaw tweeted it out. Keep in mind she previously worked *in* New York with the YES network and...uhh something else. Can't remember it at the moment. But I'd imagine she has some working relationship with who wrote this, Mike Tierney.

But who the f*** is Tommy Dortch? Why the f*** is he interviewed for this? He needs to learn what the *bleep* goes on in the sale process for the NBA. He is talking O U T O F H I S A S S.

ATLANTA — If there are surefire formulas for chasing an N.B.A. title, here is not one of them: Infuriate your players and alienate much of an already diminished fan base with the disclosure of racially charged comments by the controlling owner and the general manager soon before training camp opens; hang a for-sale sign on the franchise; operate without the exiled general manager; and entrust a roster with just one All-N.B.A. player (Al Horford, third team in 2010-11) to a coach in his second season overseeing a team, not counting youth leagues in Denmark.

Somehow, though, the Atlanta Hawks have moved beyond these issues to forge the best record in the Eastern Conference (25-8) and, compared with last season, generate a substantial spike in attendance (up 15 percent) and local TV ratings (up 40 percent).

Several players warrant all-star consideration on a team that has won 18 of its last 20 games. Mike Budenholzer may be the league’s coach of the year so far. And the work Danny Ferry did to shape the team would make him worthy for the G.M. award, if only he were on the job.

Instead, Ferry was placed on leave, as the team described his status, an early step on its extended apology tour orchestrated by Steve Koonin, the Hawks’ chief executive since April. The next phase is accepting bids from prospective owners this week, meaning that the controlling owner, Bruce Levenson, and many of his partners stand to make a tidy profit as they exit.

Alluding to Atlanta’s rise from the ashes after being burned to the ground during the Civil War, as symbolized by a phoenix above flames on the city seal, Koonin said, “Maybe we’ll be the latest” to do so.

Between opening tips and game-ending buzzers, the recovery could not be proceeding more smoothly. The players, most of whom were on the team last year, have bought in to the Budenholzer-Ferry doctrine that accentuates ball movement and unselfish play.

Elton Brand, a backup center-forward who has played for five teams in his 16 seasons, said the Hawks shunned the isolation sets designed to create one-on-one situations.

“Every team I’ve been on before has run iso plays,” Brand said, adding, “We have freedom.”

The Hawks’ passing is statistically unsurpassed: 67 percent of their baskets have been assisted. Only one team had taken fewer uncontested shots through Saturday.

Dallas Mavericks Coach Rick Carlisle has called the Hawks the league’s most underrated team. The Cavaliers’ LeBron James lauded them as the Eastern version of the San Antonio Spurs, with their unselfish approach.

But Koonin, an Atlanta native who has been an executive with Coca-Cola and Turner Entertainment Networks, suggests that a lofty perch in the standings is no cure-all for lingering ill will in the community from an insensitive email written by Levenson in 2012 and sent to Ferry and Levenson’s ownership group.

In the email, Levenson speculated that the team’s black fans “scared away the whites” and that there were “not enough affluent black fans to build a significant season-ticket base.” He also said the Kiss Cam on TV broadcasts was “too black.”

The email was discovered after a team investigation into an audiotape in which Ferry was heard disparaging the African heritage of Luol Deng, a player who was a free agent. Soon after the details went public in September, Levenson said he would sell his portion of the team.

“Nothing prepares you for what we went through,” Koonin said, adding that his goal now was for the team to create a “personal connection” with fans.

“I wish winning was the only thing,” he said. “That’s just not Atlanta.”

Koonin trumpets Atlanta as a bastion of diversity that once lifted tourism by dubbing itself “the city too busy to hate.” He wants the team’s aspirations, from the bosses on down, to mirror the city’s.

Last month, he created a position unique to professional sports, chief diversity and inclusion officer. He gave the job to Nzinga Shaw, who previously worked in human resources with the N.F.L. and the YES Network and as a public relations executive.

“I was disheartened to learn that people in such positions of power would use such harmful and negative language,” said Shaw, who responded to the job posting after seeing it on the N.B.A.'s website.

She has pledged to rebuild trust with the community by advancing training for employees and forming a diversity council to develop strategies, including having players serve as mentors to youth. As a start, Koonin has envisioned the club financing construction of playground courts or providing security for existing ones.

Still, the announcement of the intent to sell the team and the departure of Ferry did not placate all civic leaders, primarily African-Americans, and the burden to make amends has fallen largely on Koonin. Besides hiring Shaw, he approved a statue to honor the popular Hawks Hall of Famer Dominique Wilkins (“easiest decision I’ve had to make”), lowered ticket prices for some cheaper seats and solicited advice from prominent residents.

One of them, Tommy W. Dortch Jr., chairman emeritus of the volunteer movement 100 Black Men of America, has been critical of the Hawks and the league for not moving more quickly on overhauling ownership.

Noting that Donald Sterling was forced to divest his ownership of the Los Angeles Clippers within weeks of the revelation of racist remarks he made, Dortch said: “It’s been months, and I think it’s appalling that they have dragged their feet. If you compare it to the Clippers, the Atlanta situation was worse. It was more ingrained.”

Dortch said Commissioner Adam Silver should have expedited the sale.

“The team is having a winning streak, but the organization is in limbo,” Dortch said.

Koonin attributes the drawn-out process to a complicated ownership structure. Levenson and two associates control just over 50 percent. A consortium of Atlantans holds a 32 percent stake, while a faction based in New York maintains the rest.

“It’s a very complex and very big transaction,” he said.

The entire franchise is on the market, according to a report in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, though at least some current local owners wish to stay involved. Among the interested parties is a group that includes the former N.B.A. player Chris Webber, who has a home in Atlanta. The mayor’s office, which has helped line up suitors, wants the Hawks’ new owners to be local, unlike Levenson, who lives in Washington.

To Koonin, an owner’s mailing address is less important than his understanding of the fabric of the city that bills itself as a mecca of opportunity for blacks and other minorities.

The racially tinged strife seems to have unified the Hawks, as it did the Clippers.

“As a team, we cared together and decided the situation was wrong and moved on,” Atlanta forward Paul Millsap said. “In a sense, it brought us closer.”

Budenholzer, from a slightly different angle, theorized that the team’s existing fellowship enabled it to get beyond the hurtful statements by Levenson and Ferry.

Ferry’s fate will be determined once new ownership is in place. As much as the team’s thriving is a reflection of his uncanny judgment regarding players and coaches, the new owners may want to rid the franchise of any reminders of troubled times.

“No way Ferry can come back,” Dortch said. “If he comes back, it will rekindle the hate spread by him and Bruce. Danny needs to move on. He can’t be forgiven for what he said.”

On the court, the Hawks are displaying a brand of basketball that is drawing waves of admirers, though they and Budenholzer, a longtime Spurs assistant who has absorbed some of Ferry’s duties, downplay any suggestion that they are San Antonio East, preferring to carve their own identity.

Since arriving from St. Louis in 1968, the Hawks have yet to reach the conference finals. That possibility, which seemed far-fetched a few months ago, has become so real that Koonin believes the team can become a magnet for free agents.

“They all stay here,” he said, referring to the numerous players with primary or secondary homes in Atlanta. “Now we have to get them to stay here and play here.”

Correction: January 5, 2015

An earlier version of this article referred correctly to Al Horford. He is the only player on the Hawks’ roster to make an All-N.BA. team, not the only All-Star. (Horford, Paul Millsap and Elton Brand have made an All-Star team.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/05/sports/basketball/despite-tumult-around-them-the-atlanta-hawks-have-risen-to-the-top.html

[AHF]

Nzinga Shaw tweeted it out. Keep in mind she previously worked *in* New York with the YES network and...uhh something else. Can't remember it at the moment. But I'd imagine she has some working relationship with who wrote this, Mike Tierney.

But who the f*** is Tommy Dortch? Why the f*** is he interviewed for this? He needs to learn what the *bleep* goes on in the sale process for the NBA. He is talking O U T O F H I S A S S.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/05/sports/basketball/despite-tumult-around-them-the-atlanta-hawks-have-risen-to-the-top.html

 

Agreed.  Dortch clearly does not understand what happened with the Clippers, the history with the Clippers (more ingrained in Atlanta than under Sterling?!?  WTF?!??), or how the sales process with Atlanta works (including  that the NBA cannot force it).  I am sure he is quite accomplished and understands a lot of things much better than I do but this is not one of them.  He needs to either dig deeper to get the facts or to stop shooting from the hip on this.  Of course, he seems to be someone who likes the media spotlight so it may be perfectly fine with him to play the role of the "inflammatory quote" in an article to get more media time.

 

The one thing this does highlight is that if Ferry returns we will see people stirring the pot and pounding their chests to get media attention and it will be a second round of stories on that controversy at that point in time.  That has always been a given in my mind but this just drives that point home.

[lethalweapon3]

Oh yeah, the former 100 Black Men leader, I recall him during the 1990s (speeches and whatnot) but hadn't heard of him news-wise lately.*** He was also a former aide to Sam Nunn back in the day. He runs a paratransit company and a business consulting firm now. He's in that "With All Due Respect" category of esteemed local folks who never cared to scratch past the surface of what's been going on here.

 

At the risk of over-reading his mindset, via both his everyday life and his profession, Dortch has seen more than enough instances where missteps far less egregious than Danny's earned employees of (nonwhite) color much worse than a well-paid timeout chair. Dortch is also among many that have observed a notable stretch of newsworthy racial injustices that, to many, reached less-than-satisfactory conclusions.

 

With those perspectives in mind, he wants a pound of flesh from somewhere for Ferry's Folly, a progressive symbol of reparation if not much more. He knows Levenson is getting a nine-digit "severance", if you will, for his blunders, errors Brucie has been nothing but disingenuous about in the days following his announcement. That leaves Danny as the only guy who can "pay" with something that counts: his paycheck. The intra-organizational machinations that spit all this crapola into our collective laps are of little concern to him. And there are plenty of folks with similar viewpoints, but it's hard to suggest that the conclusion Dortch reached is a decidedly majority opinion.

 

As @AHF notes, of course there will be a little "Sound and Fury" from those who feel the penance was not severe enough, along with a few others who desire some facetime on TV news to build their own profiles. However, I believe Ferry has had ample time to interface with some of Dortch's local contemporaries who can vouch for the scale of his contrition. He will also have Shaw in place to assess what, if any, more he needs to do, and to help him make the case for his professional evolution to any new ownership group that comes along. The new owner(s) will be challenged to justify why they've retained Ferry, and the things he has done behind the scenes since June will embolden the narrative. The old owners, aside from Koonin, will do what they typically do and ignore the protestors out of hand as they wait for their golden parachutes to arrive.

 

As we know, Ferry has no desire to come back as long as you-know-who remains an owner anyway. But he will return, soon, if there are enough firewalls in place to keep from having to answer directly to Junior until a new owner comes around. It's safe to say that once Ferry returns, he won't simply walk back into the office in business-as-usual mode. Not only will he not be able to do so, but he personally will not want to.

 

*** EDIT: For the folks in the Seniorsquawk section, I forgot that Dortch leads Operation HOPE, which is the financial-dignity group that former Hawk Theo Ratliff is aligned with, mentioned in the "Where Are they Now?" profile of Theo.

 

https://www.operationhope.org/hopeboardmember/sgc/15/c/5826

 

~lw3

Edited January 6, 2015 by lethalweapon3

[Guest]

Skeet skeet Dortch...we are winning, mind your own F kin biz...haters come in flocks...

[Plainview1981]

Does everything involving NY have suck so bad??

Edited January 6, 2015 by Hotlanta1981

[HawkItus]

Mr. Dortch is a very influential business man in Atlanta.  He is a former chairman of the 100 Black Men of Atlanta, one of the most prestigious organizations in the city.   If the Hawks want to tap into Atlanta wealth he matters.

Edited January 6, 2015 by HawkItus

[HawkItus]

http://www.100blackmen-atlanta.org/

 

Take it from there site.  They are philanthropic entity that promotes education and citizenship for minority and underprivileged youth in Atlanta.  Membership is not an easy process.  Plain and simple it is the Atlanta version of the Augusta country club.  You need to be somebody to be a member.

[lethalweapon3]

The more I think about this, and from reading @lethalweapon3's reply, I think this is a Mike Tierney problem. Why is he giving Dortch a mouth-piece here? Dortch is talking out of his ass much like Kasim Reed has done. They are spewing out incorrect information on this issue. These people should not be a voice of anything that is "fair and balanced" as Nzinga Shaw claimed this article was...

Argh. This is frustrating.

 

 

With all due respect (there I go again) to Shaw, to be really "fair and balanced" as it pertains to Ferry, Tierney would seek out comment from at least another "prominent member" of Atlanta's black social leadership (the ones Tierney notes Koonin has consulted) that has a divergent viewpoint from Dortch's. As it is, Tierney leaves it as if Dortch's personal opinion is monolithic within "the community."

 

~lw3

Edited January 6, 2015 by lethalweapon3

[JETSET]

lol so Shaw is backing this junk as fair and balanced.  That tells me all I need to know about her.

[TheNorthCydeRises]

Some of you may need to know that Dortch is one of Dominique's closest friends, and was the one who has been trying to get a statue for Nique for a few years now. But the exiled GM told Dortch that "we dont do statues". He's also close with Gearon and Seydel.

Yall must have missed this back in September.

http://saportareport.com/blog/2014/09/more-calls-for-hawks-gm-danny-ferry-to-step-down-as-focus-turns-to-star-dominique-wilkins/

When you see the quote by Dortch, and combine it with what Seydel said about wanting to still be involved with the Hawks ... those guys know something all of us don't.

I'm predicting that Gearon and Seydel will be bought out at around 200 million, only to buy right back in, when the new ownership group puts about 15% - 20% up for sale.

Edited January 6, 2015 by TheNorthCydeRises

[Guest]

Some of you may need to know that Dortch is one of Dominique's closest friends, and was the one who has been trying to get a statue for Nique for a few years now. But the exiled GM told Dortch that "we dont do statues". He's also close with Gearon and Seydel.

Yall must have missed this back in September.

http://saportareport.com/blog/2014/09/more-calls-for-hawks-gm-danny-ferry-to-step-down-as-focus-turns-to-star-dominique-wilkins/

When you see the quote by Dortch, and combine it with what Seydel said about wanting to still be involved with the Hawks ... those guys know something all of us don't.

I'm predicting that Gearon and Seydel will be bought out at around 200 million, only to buy right back in, when the new ownership group puts about 15% - 20% up for sale.

I didn't know that. I guess I'm happy about Dortch being one of Nique's good friends and backing the Nique statue but I'm not happy about the Ferry thing. I'm still in the camp of giving Ferry another chance. Just my opinion.

[AHF]

Oh yeah, the former 100 Black Men leader, I recall him during the 1990s (speeches and whatnot) but hadn't heard of him news-wise lately.*** He was also a former aide to Sam Nunn back in the day. He runs a paratransit company and a business consulting firm now. He's in that "With All Due Respect" category of esteemed local folks who never cared to scratch past the surface of what's been going on here.

 

At the risk of over-reading his mindset, via both his everyday life and his profession, Dortch has seen more than enough instances where missteps far less egregious than Danny's earned employees of (nonwhite) color much worse than a well-paid timeout chair. Dortch is also among many that have observed a notable stretch of newsworthy racial injustices that, to many, reached less-than-satisfactory conclusions.

 

With those perspectives in mind, he wants a pound of flesh from somewhere for Ferry's Folly, a progressive symbol of reparation if not much more. He knows Levenson is getting a nine-digit "severance", if you will, for his blunders, errors Brucie has been nothing but disingenuous about in the days following his announcement. That leaves Danny as the only guy who can "pay" with something that counts: his paycheck. The intra-organizational machinations that spit all this crapola into our collective laps are of little concern to him. And there are plenty of folks with similar viewpoints, but it's hard to suggest that the conclusion Dortch reached is a decidedly majority opinion.

 

As @AHF notes, of course there will be a little "Sound and Fury" from those who feel the penance was not severe enough, along with a few others who desire some facetime on TV news to build their own profiles. However, I believe Ferry has had ample time to interface with some of Dortch's local contemporaries who can vouch for the scale of his contrition. He will also have Shaw in place to assess what, if any, more he needs to do, and to help him make the case for his professional evolution to any new ownership group that comes along. The new owner(s) will be challenged to justify why they've retained Ferry, and the things he has done behind the scenes since June will embolden the narrative. The old owners, aside from Koonin, will do what they typically do and ignore the protestors out of hand as they wait for their golden parachutes to arrive.

 

As we know, Ferry has no desire to come back as long as you-know-who remains an owner anyway. But he will return, soon, if there are enough firewalls in place to keep from having to answer directly to Junior until a new owner comes around. It's safe to say that once Ferry returns, he won't simply walk back into the office in business-as-usual mode. Not only will he not be able to do so, but he personally will not want to.

 

*** EDIT: For the folks in the Seniorsquawk section, I forgot that Dortch leads Operation HOPE, which is the financial-dignity group that former Hawk Theo Ratliff is aligned with, mentioned in the "Where Are they Now?" profile of Theo.

 

https://www.operationhope.org/hopeboardmember/sgc/15/c/5826

 

~lw3

 

Good post.  The short version is that Dortch has an agenda with regard to getting his 'pound of flesh' from Ferry and/or negative press for the Hawks.  It would be nice if he better educated himself on the history of the Clippers and Sterling, the sales process in LA and the sales process in Atlanta before he is quoted in the NY Times as an authority on these things.

 

If he has been fighting Ferry on getting Nique a statue, he probably decided he was done with Ferry a long time ago and the opportunity now to provide an opinion in the nation's biggest paper is too much to pass up.  I don't even mind if he goes off on Ferry for that and explains why the refusal to put up the statue for Nique is a terminable offense in his book.  Just don't confuse the issues by spouting misinformation on the sales process as a cover for those underlying issues.

[Gray Mule]

Tommy W. Dortch Jr. Is spewing vile hatred.

 

Apparently, he will only be happy if the new owners of the Hawks are 100% black

and our GM is put up in front of a firing squad and he is the one with the loaded gun.

 

Maybe I'm wrong, but this is what he sounds like to me.  100% racist.

[lethalweapon3]

*** EDIT: For the folks in the Seniorsquawk section, I forgot that Dortch leads Operation HOPE, which is the financial-dignity group that former Hawk Theo Ratliff is aligned with, mentioned in the "Where Are they Now?" profile of Theo.

 

https://www.operationhope.org/hopeboardmember/sgc/15/c/5826

 

~lw3

 

Sorry for the bump, but I've been meaning to clarify that Dortch was not the "leader" for Operation HOPE, although he does serve on the Board of Directors.

 

Instead, John Hope Bryant is the organization's leader, and founder. And he had this to say a few weeks ago upon hearing news of the Hawks' sale:

 

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I anticipate Ressler's ally Bryant, in tandem with Grant Hill, will help make Ferry's transition back into his GM spot a little smoother.

 

~lw3

Edited May 29, 2015 by lethalweapon3