Patterson's departure from Blazers less than stunning

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Steve Patterson's resignation Thursday as president and general manager of the Portland Trail Blazers wasn't a surprise to league executives who had been studying the extended collapse of the organization. The Blazers had a March 1 option to pick up the final year of his contract.

They were never going to retain him, so a deal was arranged for Patterson to announce he was stepping down.

The Blazers had already made those intentions plain by bringing in executive VP of business operations Mike Golub early this season without Patterson's input. They lost faith in Patterson after his plan to put the Rose Garden into bankruptcy backfired, costing the Blazers a lot of money as well as the humiliating intervention of commissioner David Stern to negotiate owner Paul Allen's bid to repurchase the arena. One league source said the Blazers lost more than $100 million on that gaffe.

Patterson openly criticized the expensive player contracts acquired by predecessor Bob Whitsitt, whose reign of 50-win seasons and sellout crowds is a distant memory in Portland. Yet under Patterson's watch the Blazers made a series of moves that kept the team in a hole by giving big contracts to Zach Randolph and Darius Miles and investing a key first-round pick in Sebastian Telfair. He also allowed his relationships with reporters in the local media to grow petty, to the point that he searched office computers and threatened to fire employees in search of those who were leaking information to the press.

The Blazers lost money, fans and games in altogether huge numbers while Patterson was in charge. There was talk that he might have saved his job by rebuilding the roster with a flurry of draft-day trades, but Allen was not going to be swayed by one night of fun.

Maybe running the Blazers was always going to be an impossible job for anyone who came after Whitsitt. There are Blazers employees who speak highly of Patterson, and the team finally appears to be showing improvement thanks to the additions of coach Nate McMillan and Rookie of the Year favorite Brandon Roy. But the overall morale of that organization remains low, and the Blazers will never be able to make a sincere attempt to win back their fans until they can rally their own employees to work as a team.

It would be a mistake to assume that the Blazers will simply promote Golub and assistant GM Kevin Pritchard to share Patterson's abandoned titles. If so, then wouldn't the team have made that announcement and cleaned up its business immediately?

The real question is whether Allen might be intrigued by hiring the most famous name available ... Jerry West, for example.