Portland Trailblazers Streisand Stupid Local Article Into National Spotlight For No Reason At All

from the getting-blazed dept

While stories about the Streisand Effect here are legion, the most frustrating aspect of them for me is typically how pointless and petty the victims of it are. There are so many of life's problems that can be best taken on by being completely ignored and the simple fact is that many famous folk and large companies have a much larger capacity and ability to ignore petty shit than the average person. I mean, come on people, you have lawyers and PR teams.

The Portland Trailblazers certainly do. And, yet, they appear to have decided to Streisand a mildly trafficked big dumb stupid local publication into the national spotlight just by failing to ignore it. The setup here is a playoffs game 3 loss and Tim Brown, an editor of the Oregonian, doing the laziest of "articles."

Tim Brown, the “Sports Trending Editor” of the Oregonian, published a lazy and actually-not-obligatory roundup of tweets from Blazers fans, NBA watchers, and lame-brained viral-hunting meme jockeys. Maybe these kinds of Twitter roundups are meant to be cathartic for fans, but mostly they suck mondo ass.

There are 131 tweets embedded in Brown’s stupid post, mashing together bot-crafted shit like SportsCenter’s Twitter account recycling the grim success rate of teams down 3–0 in NBA playoff series—spoiler alert: it’s bad—with one each of every meme GIF ever made, plus, like, some internet blue check mark drearily firing off “This is a tough one.”

It goes on from there, but the point is that the post was lazy and dumb, constructed mostly of Twitter reactions that add roughly zero value to anyone looking for a piece on this particular game. These sorts of articles are also not rare, however, and pretty much every professional sports team, major market or otherwise, are the subject of similar "takes."  

The whole thing would have ended there, except that the post's headline yoinked a bad joke from a bad national sports journalist and then pumped the whole thing out onto social media sites for public consumption. Once the tweets and retweets, mostly limited to local Blazers fans, reached members of the team, one of them that should absolutely have known better decided to respond.

Predictably, this tweet was seen by members of the Trail Blazers organization, among them Chris McGowan, the team’s president and CEO. Probably the right thing for McGowan and those in his employ to do with this kind of internet junk is sigh and grit their teeth and ignore it, but here he has chosen another course:


Suddenly, what was a barely noticable dumb local post has not only entered the national attention category, but the Trailblazers come off looking petty. In fact, if you squint at this whole story in just the right way, the Oregonion appears to cut a sympathetic figure.

And why? Again, every team has to endure this sort of thing and most of them safely ignore it all. Why Streisand this big dumb stupid article with threats of pulling ad-buys from a local publication over all of this?

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Filed Under: chris mcgowan, press attention, sports coverage, streisand effect
Companies: portland trailblazers


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  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2019 @ 12:39am

    Grit your teeth

    Maybe this would have been a better response?
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxh5Mr_UzwQ

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2019 @ 2:13am

    Being petty is precisely what gave us debacles such as Shiva Ayyadurai.

    If the guy had kept his yap shut nobody outside his close circle of carefully curated friends and social network would have cared.

    Instead he paid money to have a judge officially declare that not even Shiva can definitively prove he invented email.

    The Trailblazers done made an Ayyadurai-level fuck up.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    That Anonymous Coward (profile), 24 May 2019 @ 5:28am

    "As long as I am in charge, I will make sure we don’t spend another dime with them. This is ridiculous. https://t.co/xEBnSAMwUj"

    It was SO HORRIBLE, I shared a link to it, creating more coverage of it!
    Or maybe I was hoping the legion of fans for my team will swoop in and harass him for daring to upset his betters.

    Mr. McGowan,

    If this tweet upset you this much... log off the internet and never return. People will say mean things about you, your team, your hair, all sorts of things... You are a public figure.
    The OMG WE'LL NEVER ADVERTISE WITH THEM AGAIN!!!
    Well that shows the public you are a thin skinned child, liable to lash out unless people only ever say nice things about you.

    Stop emulating our toddler in chief & grow up.
    Unless of course you wanted everyone to think you are a petty child, in that case carry on... but don't be shocked if your tantrums cost you the good will of your fanbase.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 24 May 2019 @ 6:32am

    The Trailblazers stopped being my team a long time ago, around the time they earned the Jailblazers nickname. A bunch of overpaid, self-entitled toddlers.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    nerdrage (profile), 24 May 2019 @ 10:01am

    Use your pr team

    Public figures (sports team owners, players, actors, celebrities, politicians, etc) should get off the internet in any official capacity. Turn Twitter over to the pr pro’s. They can be disciplined and professional about it, having zero emotional investment in anything. It’s just a paycheck to them.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Bobvious, 24 May 2019 @ 6:23pm

    A storm in a tweetcup

    Well it's not like they're the Utah Saints https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7hlMR-Xn9I

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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