April 08, 2008

Sonics arena plans: One down, one to go?

Today could be D-Day for talks of renovating KeyArena to keep the Seattle Sonics in town. Yesterday, a spokesperson for the group of local billionaires offering to pay half the cost of the $300 million project (with an April 10 deadline for their offer) declared the plan all but dead; meanwhile, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels announced he'd hold a press conference this morning to discuss the plan's fate. Unless the billionaire group's announcement was a ploy to get Nickels off the dime (I swear I did not have that pun in mind when I started typing it), it's a fair bet that the mayor's announcement will be that the last best hope for spending public money to appease the Sonics has failed.

There is still one other arena plan out there: the one announced last week by ex-Sonics star Freddie Brown and WongDoody Communications director Dave Bean to build a $1 billion retractable-roofed downtown arena to host expansion NBA or NHL teams, using entirely private funds. Given that 1) this would be the most expensive arena project in history; 2) the second-most expensive arena project in history, Brooklyn's proposed Atlantic Yards Nets arena, is already getting several hundred million dollars in subsidies, and its developers claim it can't be viable without more; and 3) this is Seattle, which while no Oklahoma City, isn't likely to bring in a $20 million a year naming-rights deal, it seems likely this plan will go down in history with other phantom sports projects of years past.

Not that that makes it any less fun to say "WongDoody." And maybe that's all Bean is after - it's all about mind share, after all.