With no news at all about where the Sacramento Kings are likely to end up, and no real way to research it since the only people who might know are the 30 NBA owners and they ain’t talking, what’s there left to write about?

• How NBA commissioner David Stern is “anguishing” over the decision of where to place the team, though he doesn’t actually have a vote. And that Kings officials have been told to prepare marketing and season ticket plans for next season and otherwise “sit tight,” which doesn’t actually tell us anything.
• Pretty pictures of what a new Sacramento arena might look like. Apparently it comes with its own blimp!

The NBA relocation committee is likely meeting today or tomorrow, after which we probably still won’t know anything. Sit tight, people.

With everything else going on, I didn’t bother to mention Monday’s poll results showing that 78% of Sacramentans would like to have a referendum on a Kings arena plan, mostly because 1) I’m starting to feel like you can find a pollster willing to show anything you want these days (Chris Daniels of Seattle’s KING-TV notes that the poll was only of 300 people, and had a nearly 6% margin of error), and 2) who isn’t going to say they’re in favor of getting to vote on something, whether they’re agin it or fer it? (Those polled were just about evenly split on how they’d vote in a hypothetical referendum.)

That, though, was before pollster Tab Berg said he’s been getting death threats as a result:

“You hate Sacramento, and you’re an evil person… And make threats to my livelihood, and even a couple that have recently come through to my family. It’s extraordinarily disappointing.”

The threats are presumably from people who want to keep the Kings, though Berg himself says he supports a new arena, and thinks there would be more support for it if people had a say. (I’m not endorsing his logic here, just describing it.) It also led Sacramento’s Fox40 to reach this stunning conclusion:

Still, both sides agree that a debate shouldn’t escalate to violence.

It’s really all about finding common ground, isn’t it?

As far as actual Kings news goes, the NBA relocation committee is set to meet again late this week, at which point it will presumably make a recommendation, starting the 7-day clock at which point the full NBA owners’ group can vote on the Kings’ fate. Which means:

David Stern tells ESPN radio that league will rule on #NBAKings ‘prob’ly end of the 1st week, beginning of the 2nd week in May.”

— Dale Kasler (@dakasler) April 23, 2013

Unless it doesn’t. But with the Seattle and Sacramento groups no longer throwing more money on the table, it’s looking more likely that the NBA may be ready to declare the bidding war over, and decide on a winner. Or a loser, depending on how you look at it.

[UPDATE: Berg now says he never got death threats, and Fox40 misinterpreted his quotes. Which is disappointing. Or reassuring, depending on how you look at it.]

After the NBA sent out its announcement on Tuesday that a vote on whether the Sacramento Kings will be moved to Seattle would be delayed beyond this week’s NBA owners’ meetings, there was some speculation that this was because league bylaws require a 7-day waiting period between a committee recommendation and a full league vote. And the relocation committee couldn’t mean last week, I guess, because they couldn’t get dinner reservations?

Anyway, the relocation committee met yesterday, and afterwards league officials were more blunt than usual: Don’t count on a decision anytime soon.

Emerging from a four-hour meeting of NBA team owners charged with examining the Sacramento Kings’ proposed sale and move to Seattle, NBA Commissioner David Stern said today a final decision on the issue could still be at least two weeks away.

Stern said the owners on the joint relocation/finance advisory committee had not decided on a recommendation on the franchise’s future, but that the group has scheduled another meeting on the subject – their third – set for late next week. If a recommendation is made then, the full Board of Governors, made up of the league’s 30 team owners, cannot vote on the matter until seven days later, Stern said.

“The committee still has additional questions as they go through this in great detail,” Stern said. He said those questions still concern potential lawsuits facing arena plans in both Sacramento and Seattle, as well as financial issues with those plans.

If that wasn’t clear enough, San Antonio Spurs owner Peter Holt said following the meeting that the committee is “not even close” to a decision. Holt also said — I think in response to a question about league expansion, though the Sacramento Bee article that reported this was unclear — that “The world is growing. We’re focused on China and India and those kind of places.” Which if you’re in a Sacramento kind of mood could be a positive sign for prospective local owner Vivek Ranadive, who has declared that he’s committed to “making [basketball] the No. 2 sport in India” behind cricket.

Anyway, it appears that the NBA is just as confused as the rest of us where the Kings will end up, and isn’t going to make a decision until it’s good and ready. At some point this could mean endangering the possibility of relocating the team for the 2013-14 season, but for now, everybody is content to stay in “tell me more” mode. As they probably should be, when the “more” has at times meant more cash.

Let’s set the Wayback Machine for March 26, when Sacramento had just approved a preliminary term sheet for a new Kings arena:

@seattleguy234 My pet guess right now: NBA votes to defer a vote on the sale until the Sacto financing bill is complete.

— Field of Schemes (@fieldofschemes) March 27, 2013

That was a total guess, but it’s looking pretty good after yesterday’s announcement that the NBA is postponing its vote on whether to allow the Kings to move to Seattle. The league didn’t give a reason why, or indicate how long the delay will last. Instead, two committees made up of “a select group of about a dozen team owners,” according to the Sacramento Bee, are meeting today at an undisclosed location in New York to review the Sacramento and Seattle proposals, and will make recommendations to the full league.

This could just be a procedural move designed to keep every owner in the league from having to read all the financial documents involved, or it could be a stalling measure so that the NBA can see what else the two sides come up with for upping the ante. Guess we’ll find out more after today. Or, more likely, after what happens today leaks out a week from now.

You know, when I first referred to the custody battle for the Sacramento Kings as a bidding war a few weeks ago, I meant it metaphorically: Sacramento would present a fancy piece of paper swearing that its arena plan wasn’t held together by spit and chewing gum, Seattle would counteroffer with a promise that so long as the NBA plays there all league officials will receive a lifetime supply of fresh sockeye salmon, like that. But lo and behold, what erupted over the weekend looks like an honest-to-god bidding war with cold, hard cash:

• On Thursday, with a looming deadline set by the Maloof brothers — the current owners of the Kings who had been all but forgotten in this back and forth between the proposed new owners in Seattle and Sacramento — for Sacramento bidders to match the Seattle offer for the team, USA Today reported that the Sacramento crew was ready to raise its bid by $30 million, to cover the nonrefundable deposit that Chris Hansen had committed to in offering to buy the team from the Maloofs back in January.
• On Friday, Seattle’s Chris Hansen countered by abruptly raising his bid by $25 million, “as a sign of our commitment to bring basketball back” to Seattle. Hansen would only be paying a pro-rated price for the Maloofs’ shares, so it’s not actually $25 million more in real dollars, but the total team value in the sale offer would rise from $525 million to $550 million.
• The Sacramento group called Hansen’s increased offer a “move of desperation” (in the Sacramento Bee’s paraphrase), and predicted it wouldn’t be enough to sway the NBA’s decision one way or the other.
• Meanwhile, Sports Illustrated ran an article outlining all the things that are dodgy about Sacramento’s arena plan, and the website Sactown Royalty ran a long rebuttal saying that Sacramento is really really trying here, so get off their case okay?
• Oh yeah, and while this was all going on, a Seattle judge dismissed a lawsuit against Hansen’s proposed arena, though only because all the financing details aren’t finalized, so there’s every likelihood the suit will be refiled in a few months.

Phew. So all this certainly sounds like stuff that, on balance, would at least marginally increase Seattle’s odds of landing the Kings — except that, as I hope I’ve made clear by now, whatever process the NBA uses to determine where the team plays next year isn’t going to be nearly so straightforward as weighing two purchase offers, or even two arena deal offers, and seeing which one pencils out to be more lucrative. Both the Seattle and the Sacramento groups have come up with plans that will get them in the conversation; what happens from here really is going to come down to internecine NBA owner politics. So I expect the Sacramento Bee’s source is right about one thing: Whatever harebrained rationale the NBA ends up using to decide the fate of the Kings, a pro-rated $25 million in cash probably isn’t going to be it.

I don’t usually post here late at night, first because there’s hardly anyone around to read it, and second because I’d rather be asleep myself. But I won’t be around in the morning, and there’s way too much news — or at least reporting of sources claiming to have news — in the Sacramento Kings situation to wait on.

First came a report today by Sacramento TV station KCRA that a “source close to the [Kings] negotiations” was reporting that the Maloof brothers, owners of the Kings, had set a 5 p.m. Friday deadline for would-be Sacramento buyers to offer a bid equal to that of the Seattle group led by Chris Hansen. If such a bid was not forthcoming by then, according to a similarly sourced story in the Sacramento Bee, “the Maloofs have said any talks are off with the Sacramento group.”

That’s pretty crazy, and paints a picture of the Maloofs as either desperate to get the Sacramento “whales” to up their ante lest they get stuck with a lower bid if the NBA rules against the Seattle purchase (both sites cited the source as saying the Sacramento bid was “not even close”), or hoping to scare the league into approving the sale to the Seattle group for fear of being stuck with the Maloofs indefinitely. It’s a strange way of going about it, but then, the Maloofs are known for that sort of thing.

And as if that weren’t enough, this evening we got the long-awaited (if also anonymously sourced) leak of what went on in last week’s NBA meetings on the Kings issue, courtesy of indefatigable Seattle KING5 reporter Chris Daniels. And man, was it a doozy:

• According to multiple sources, reports Daniels, “the second half of the Sacramento presentation [to the NBA] was ‘poor’ — based more on “vision than fact.’”
• Hansen has estimated that a cable deal in Seattle could generate more than $40 million a year, nearly double what has been estimated for a similar deal in Sacramento.
• Accordingly, “several NBA team owners last week indicated their willingness to move the franchise to Seattle.” Yet NBA commissioner David Stern, according to the same sources, “has been quietly maneuvering behind the scenes to propel a Sacramento counter bid,” even working to recruit new members for the Sacramento ownership group.

If true — and it’s always possible that unnamed sources are just trying to spin things toward their own ends, though somewhat less so when a story is sourced to multiple anonymous individuals — then it sounds like we’re getting every lick of the in-fighting that we could have hoped for from an NBA owners’ meeting. Daniels said that “multiple people with knowledge of the negotiations said Wednesday it is still unclear whether a vote will be taken,” which makes sense if there are two competing factions in the room. (A three-quarters supermajority is required to approve the sale.)

It certainly sounds like the NBA owners have recognized that the Sacramento bid is a tad shaky, whereas Stern, at least, is recognizing the value of rewarding cities that come up with arena deals (shaky or no) in response to move threat blackmail. All that means, though, is that NBA owners can read Twitter like the rest of us. As to how they’ll actually vote, I wouldn’t try to predict that at this point if you paid me.

This is apparently pecked-to-death-by-ducks week for the Sacramento Kings arena proponents: After a series of minor setbacks over the previous few days, yesterday it was learned that one of the prospective purchasers of the team, Pittsburgh Penguins co-owner Ron Burkle, will have to back out because his film studio owns a player agency that represents several NBA players, which represents an unacceptable conflict of interest according to league rules.

Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson was quick to say, “We’re comfortable where we are” in terms of remaining prospective investors in the team, and as Burkle’s exit was apparently in response to questions raised at last week’s NBA meeting, you could interpret this as a positive move for Sacramento, clearing an obstacle to the city’s plan, albeit one that nobody was aware of. (Though anybody with Wikipedia should have been aware of it.) As with the previous news, it depends on what the mood of the room is around the Kings sale talks: If NBA owners are looking for an excuse to let the team go to Seattle, this can be pointed to as evidence of a shaky and ever-changing Sacramento plan; if they’re looking for an excuse to reject the move, this can be seen as a willingness on Sacramento’s part to do whatever it takes to win league approval.

At this point, the NBA is sitting pretty, with no bad answer to its problem of two cities battling over one team. Unless, of course, the losing city decides to sue, as Stanford economist Roger Noll says they’d have grounds to do:

“Whichever city is going to lose has an antitrust case against the NBA for not having a team in that city,” Noll said.

Noll says either city would have a case to make because both cities are viable locations for the team and either one could argue the league is illegally restricting the number of teams. He says it’s kind of like the railroad cartels more than a century ago.

“The crucial issue is whether the purpose and effect of the restriction is simply to enhance the monopoly power of the existing set of teams,” Noll said.

It would be a risky move on the one hand, as threatening to sue the people who you’re hoping will grant you a franchise isn’t usually the best way to get them on your side. On the other hand, it worked for Florida when the San Francisco Giants were denied the chance to move to Tampa Bay in the early 1990s — incidentally, do you think the team’s current owners are thrilled now that that never happened? — and the mere hint of an antitrust suit was enough to get MLB to create the expansion Devil Rays as compensation.

Noll, who knows a little something about antitrust law, says he expects expansion to be the ultimate result here as well, and he has a pretty good case: While MLB is more defensive of antitrust suits thanks to wanting to protect its special antitrust exemption, the NBA is going to want to have this resolved out of court as well. Which means that in the long run, we could be going through all this sturm und drang around the fate of the Kings for nothing. Well, nothing except getting both sides to up the ante as far as possible before the NBA decides who gets an existing crappy team and who gets a new one.

There was a ton of stadium news over the last 48 hours, but let’s get right to what I know you all want to hear about: What happened at the NBA meeting yesterday to determine whether the Sacramento Kings will move to Seattle or stay put?

Mayor Johnson and State Senator Steinberg arrived at the St. Regis hotel Wednesday morning to meet with the NBA and present their deal to keep the Kings.

Right, okay, the Sacramento contingent showed up, that’s nice. But then?

It may come down to who made the best presentation, but I doubt it. If it does, the Sacramento contingent led by Mayor Kevin Johnson was downright giddy following their meeting with the league’s joint relocation and finance committee.

At one point in their press conference, Johnson leaned over and hugged California Senator Darrell Steinberg. Again, I’m not sure what this all means.

So… anything on what happened inside the meetings? Anyone?

David Stern and Adam Silver held their own press conference afterwards and said that both sides gave great presentations, although no real details were released.

In other words: The NBA met (at the St. Regis Hotel for some reason, because apparently either NBA headquarters doesn’t have meeting rooms or, more likely, doesn’t have room service), both sides gave their presentations, and we’re not going to drop any hints on who the front-runner is, so back off, people.

Stern did provide a few hints at what the criteria for the decision will be, however, indicating, in the words of NBA.com’s David Aldridge, that the main questions “centered on the arena plans for each city — specifically, how soon they could go up, potential legal obstacles to the buildings in each city and the capital commitments that will be required from each group.” Stern called the existing arenas in Seattle and Sacramento “suboptimal” and noted that “there is no finality to the construction schedules in either city,” saying that the relocation committee has instructed the league to gather more information. In fact, the process could go beyond the April 17-18 league meetings, meaning a decision might not be made until an undetermined time in the future, though Stern said that “I wouldn’t expect it, if it does, to slide by a lot.”

Keeping in mind that Stern isn’t just reporting the facts of the meeting, he’s also sending a message to the two cities involved, that message seems to be: Nice arena plans, guys, but when can we actually see shovels hitting the ground? There’s been some speculation of late that Sacramento may actually have a leg up in that regard — though its arena finance plan hasn’t been officially approved by the city council and there are already threats of lawsuits and referendums, they have the advantage of the California law that was passed for AEG’s now-dead Los Angeles NFL stadium, which fast-tracks all development projects costing more than $100 million. In Seattle, development deals still need to take the slow track, with all that fussy “oversight” and “making sure it won’t be an environmental disaster” and stuff, meaning that even with its late start, Sacramento stands a better chance of opening a new arena by 2016 than Seattle does.

Would the NBA really make its decision based on one year’s difference in an arena opening schedule? Probably not, but still, Stern is sending a pretty clear message here: Talk to us till you’re blue in the face about how nice your cities are all you want, but we want to see ducks in a row on arena construction, and we want it now, and we’re not going to make a decision until we see it. (Not to say I told you so, but…) This is more and more looking like a bidding war now, not for the franchise but for the NBA’s blessing, and the currency is an arena plan that’s set in stone. It’s not at all clear how much elected officials in either city can do to make that happen in the next few weeks — or how long the NBA is prepared to wait to make a decision if they don’t — but if there are any fires to be lit under people, Stern just set them ablaze.

Things have been weirdly quiet on the Sacramento Kings front since Tuesday’s council vote, with the only big news being that would-be Seattle owner Chris Hansen has placed the winning bid for the 7% share of the team that was tied up in bankruptcy court. Hansen will pay $15.1 million for Bob Cook’s shares in the Kings, which seems like a huge bargain given that this would project a total valuation for the team of only $215 million.

Hansen may pay that much for the shares, I should say, because there’s a long way to go before this gets finalized: Other Kings minority owners still have time to match Hanson’s bid, and the NBA can still reject the sale outright. So this it mostly a PR move to try to get Hanson some Seattlecentric headlines, as well as an attempt to grab a bit more control of the team on the cheap for if and when the NBA okays a move to Seattle.

Any real news, then, is going to have to wait till next Wednesday, when NBA owners meet to hear the arguments by both Hansen’s group and representatives of the prospective Sacramento buyers for why the relocation of the team to Seattle should or shouldn’t be approved. Though given the last time we went through all this, we’re probably going to have to wait another week or so until people start leaking what happened inside the meetings before we get much sense of the Kings’ likely fate.

As expected, the Sacramento city council voted last night to approve the Kings arena term sheet by a 7-2 margin; only councilmembers Kevin McCarty and Darrell Fong voted no, on the grounds that they wanted more details and more time to examine the deal. The four-hour meeting was mostly a celebration of Mayor Kevin Johnson’s plan, with supporters donning white “Crown Downtown” t-shirts and doing, um, this.

Only 13 of the 58 people signed up to speak at the hearing (in two-minute increments) were opposed to the deal, but that’s not necessarily a sign that the deal is popular with the public. Rather, the t-shirt-wearing supporters had jammed the hearing room by 5:30 (the hearing began at 6:30), and anyone who showed up after that was not only barred from attending, but from signing up to speak. Which if it sounds vaguely familiar, should.

One of those shut out was Eye on Sacramento president Craig Powell, who earlier in the day had issued a detailed 30-page report on the city’s proposal, calling its financing plan “seriously flawed” and saying the rush to vote without sufficient time to analyze the deal raises “significant dangers to the city and taxpayers of stifling public input in these decisions.” Among the issues addressed by the nonpartisan watchdog group:

• The official $258 million figure for the public contribution to the arena omits the value of the 3,700 parking spaces being turned over gratis to the team, as well as the value of several electronic billboards that would be gifted to the Kings, plus additional tax breaks and infrastructure costs. Including those raises the total public subsidy to $334 million.
• The financing plan, in which future parking revenues would be funneled to a nonprofit corporation and be repaid in part by more future parking revenues, “exposes the city’s general fund to potential liability, ties up the city’s TOT [hotel tax] revenues, involves very high interest rates, is of a type (garage bonds) that are causing problems in other cities and involves the payment of over $80 million of additional interest in order to secure $24 million in lower payments in the first eight years of the bonds – a horrible deal for taxpayers.”
• Asked whether the city of Sacramento’s general fund would be on the hook to pay for the arena bonds if parking revenues weren’t sufficient, city attorney James Sanchez replied, “The city has some ultimate responsibility for payment of the bonds.” Meanwhile, the city staff report on the arena insists, “The revenue bonds would not be a debt obligation of the City.”
• While the city report touts the lower interest rates that would be made available by using a nonprofit corporation and backstopping the parking money with hotel taxes, the projected interest rate on the bonds would still be very high by current standards (5.5 to 5.75%), which will mean even more parking revenue would be needed to pay off the bonds.
• The figures for the projected new revenue expected to fill in the parking revenue siphoned off to pay the arena bill are nearly all “shaky and/or overstated.” In particular, “with the city giving away one-half of its garage parking spaces to the investors (the 3,700 parking spaces at Downtown Plaza), how in the world is the city going to service current debt payments on garage bonds, pay debt service on $221 million plus of new arena bonds and also backfill $3 million to the city’s general fund?”
• There’s the likelihood of an initiative or referendum campaign to repeal any Kings arena funding deal. (Indeed, at least one speaker last night promised to lead such an effort.) If this happens, suggests EOS, it could “secure funding from Seattle sources if the NBA board of governors turns down the request to relocate the Kings to Seattle.”

Finally, the report pointedly cites Harvard stadium researcher Judith Grant Long’s new book, in which she writes: “[T]he burgeoning number of public finance crisis with roots in sports facility deals points to a clear need for better understanding of the long-term risks and implications for taxpayers. Yet this kind of long-term financial analysis has been absent from much of the public discourse associated with the latest rounds of subsidies for major league sports facilities.” Hint, hint.

The council, though, didn’t get the hint, or at least didn’t want to hear it with an NBA vote looming next month on moving the Kings to Seattle. And that decision is even less likely to turn on whether the Sacramento arena plan will cost taxpayers, or whether it received due diligence — the NBA doesn’t care about any of that crap — and more likely to focus on one issue: Which city represents a more lucrative future for the NBA?

It’s going to be a tough choice, as the league is now presented with two arena deals that, from its perspective, would be a huge step up over the current Kings situation. On Seattle’s side is that it’s a bigger market, that its plan is more completely signed off on by government agencies (though an environmental review is ongoing), that the ownership group has been well-vetted, and that the NBA will no doubt want to show that it’s willing to reward cities that offer to erect new arenas to lure teams. On Sacramento’s side: The Kings wouldn’t be competing with as many other local sports options, the team’s owners would be saddled with less stadium debt, and the NBA will no doubt want to show that it’s willing to reward ciies that cough up money for new arenas to keep teams. A tough decision, yes, but having too many bidders for your services is the kind of problem that it’s good to have.

If there’s one potential fly in the ointment for the Sacramento plan, it’s that what was voted on last night wasn’t actually a financing plan, but rather a nonbinding term sheet — the council will still need to vote again in coming weeks or months to formally approve the arena funds. Given last night’s vote, that looks pretty likely to happen, but “pretty likely” isn’t the bird in the hand that is the Seattle deal, especially with the possibility of a referendum challenge in Sacramento as well.

Right now, I’d say that the Seattle sale vote is too close to call, by which I mean, “Who the hell knows what 30 NBA owners will do when they get in a room, or why?” If I had to pick a dark horse outcome, it’d be that maybe they’ll do nothing: Postpone the vote until a later date, and wait to see whether the Sacramento plan survives further scrutiny and a possible referendum. Then if Sacramento puts its money where its mouth is, it’ll be a safer decision to tell the prospective Seattle ownership group, “Sorry, next time.”

That’s not a slam dunk for the NBA, either: The Seattle group could get tired of waiting and back off its arena plan, and at best it’d likely mean another lame-duck year for the Kings in Sacramento while everyone waits out the decision. And it’s also always possible, let’s not forget, that the Maloofs could tell the league that if the team has to stay in Sacramento, they’re not selling — they’d be pretty dumb to do that at this point, but dumb sometimes seems to be their middle name. Still, though, calling a timeout would have the advantage of forcing the two cities to fight some more to distinguish themselves as the better candidate — and if there’s one rule of staging a bidding war, it’s that the more bidding you can encourage, the more that you win the war.