Tom Dundon has owned the Portland Trail Blazers since March, and he has already fired more of the people who make the product watchable than most owners manage in a decade. Michael Holton is gone after 19 seasons as the team’s TV analyst. Neil Everett, Jamie Hudson, and Tom Haberstroh are gone with him. Kevin Calabro, the play-by-play voice who spent a decade rebuilding trust with this fan base, turned down the pay cut Dundon’s people offered and isn’t walking back through that door. I’ve covered a lot of ownership groups finding creative ways to screw the people who narrate their games for a living, and I still can’t get over how fast Dundon knocked out all four at once.
Calabro’s résumé gets flattened into “legendary voice” a lot, but the actual details make Dundon look worse, not better. Calabro’s Portland tenure ran 2016 to 2026, a decade, not the “decades” some of the coverage is implying. The two decades belong to Seattle. He called SuperSonics games for 22 years, the actual voice of Pacific Northwest basketball from 1987 until the franchise packed up for Oklahoma City. So when Dundon’s front office let him go over a subprime contract offer, they weren’t lowballing a company man riding out a long Portland contract. They were lowballing one of the most trusted broadcasting voices this region has ever had, and doing it because a decade of goodwill was apparently worth less than whatever the new budget spreadsheet said. That’s not cost discipline. That’s cheap as hell, and it should be called that.
Dundon already ran this playbook once, in Carolina. He bought the Hurricanes in 2018, and when longtime radio voice Chuck Kaiton wouldn’t accept an 80 percent pay cut, Dundon didn’t negotiate. He cut the radio booth and started running the TV broadcast’s audio over the empty frequency instead, a move Barrett Media has been tracking since the Blazers cuts broke. Forbes got the Blazers organization on record this week, and the team says radio broadcasts will continue in the 2026-27 season and will not be television simulcasts. Fine. That’s a sentence Dundon had eight years to learn how to say before he needed it in Carolina, and he was presumably saying something similar to Kaiton right up until the day the number came in too high.
The one contract still hanging over all of this is Travis Demers, Portland’s radio play-by-play voice for the last seven seasons. His deal expired June 30, and nobody in the building has said whether he’s coming back in any capacity. That’s the actual thing worth watching here, not the hypothetical TV simulcast. A team can promise radio survives the season while the specific person who calls the radio games sits without a contract, and both of those statements can be true on the same afternoon.
The 70 layoffs nobody outside Portland noticed came first, back in May, roughly two months after Dundon took controlling interest in March. Forbes counted close to 70 front-office employees let go in that round, a number that doesn’t trend nationally because none of those names were famous. Beat reporters put together the full broadcast list fast once it happened:
https://twitter.com/MrBuckBuckNBA/status/2079770039075418523
The full list moved through Blazers beat writers within the hour. Holton’s nineteen seasons anchor it, but Everett, Hudson, and Haberstroh disappear in the same breath, all four gone in the same stretch of weeks that also cost 70 people in the front office their jobs.
None of this is unique to Portland, which is somehow the more depressing part. ESPN spent the same stretch of 2026 proving the exact same math works in national media too, firing the people who built the empire it just bought and running its own round of layoffs through names fans actually recognized. Production and access get cut first because they’re the easiest line item to trim, and the audience is expected to keep showing up anyway.
I read enough labor reporting to know that “his contract expired” is doing a lot of quiet work in a sentence like Demers’. Contracts don’t expire by accident. Somebody in that building has known June 30 was coming since long before it arrived, and they let it arrive anyway.
Dundon says the radio booth survives this season. Chuck Kaiton probably heard something close to that in Raleigh right up until the day it stopped being true, and Portland is about to find out how long that particular sentence is good for once the ratings come in.
