Friday roundup: Pelicans, T-Wolves arena demands floated by sportswriters whether owners are talking about them or not

Hey, remember just a few months ago when people could legitimately argue that the age of sports stadium and arena subsidy demands was coming to an end? That was before the Buffalo Bills, Arizona Coyotes, Chicago Bears, and Cleveland Guardians all joined the Oakland A’s and Tampa Bay Rays in seeking government money for new or renovated buildings, and now you can barely turn around without some new team joining the chase for the public purse:

• The New Orleans Pelicans suck, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune asks: Maybe a new arena would help? The resulting billion-word article doesn’t really answer the question, but it does reveal that owner Gayle Benson (who also owns the Saints) says she needs “some big arena investments to stay competitive,” meaning either a renovation of their 22-year-old arena or a brand-new one, and the team’s lease expires in 2024, and Benson is 74 years old and her succession plan is for the Pelicans (and Saints) to be sold on her death with the proceeds given to a charitable foundation, and she says one requirement will be that the teams stay in New Orleans, but you know they could potentially leave, so isn’t it better to be safe than sorry? (Why a billionaire who says she’s giving away her wealth to charity because “I don’t need any more money” needs more revenue to “stay competitive” is another question the Times-Picayune article doesn’t answer.)
• Meanwhile in Minneapolis, Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx owners Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez say they have “have no plans to move” the teams without a new arena, but that isn’t stopping the Minneapolis Star Tribune from reporting that they’ll move the teams without a new arena, because it’s been five whole years since their current arena got a $145 million renovation, and “I can vacuum the floor of my Chevy and repair the cigar burns on the seats. At the end of the day, it’s still a Chevy.” Also, Lore said that adding “augmented reality,” which apparently means fans wearing Google Glass-type glasses so watching in real life can be more like watching on TV, could be “incredible,” so this is totally something to dedicate an entire sports column to, how could anyone possibly think otherwise?
• On the Bears front, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has declared that “I have not had any discussions, haven’t been approached by anybody, neither the city nor the Bears themselves, so it’s not something we’re currently looking at, like I said we’re focused on our own fiscal situation.” The headline that WLS-TV put on this was “New Chicago Bears stadium in Arlington Heights won’t be paid for by IL taxpayers, Gov. Pritzker says,” which isn’t quite what he said, but I guess “New Chicago Bears stadium in Arlington Heights won’t be paid for by IL taxpayers yet, Gov. Pritzker says” didn’t rank as high in SEO.
• Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg isn’t putting up a sign inside his stadium for the postseason promoting his plan to move the team to Montreal half the year after all. “I made a big mistake, a real mistake in trying to promote our Sister City plan with a sign right now in our home ballpark. I absolutely should have known better, and really, I’m sorry for that,” said Sternberg. “I knew that a sign would bring us attention. And we do want the attention. I just didn’t completely process that now isn’t the moment for it.” Of course, one could argue that he’s already gotten the attention, so why does he need the sign, but that would be churlish, right?
• Orange County Superior Court Judge David Hoffer has ruled that Anaheim city officials need to look harder for records on how they decided to sell 150 acres of land to Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno for a cut-rate price of $150 million. The ruling was part of a now-18-month-old lawsuit seeking to overturn the deal as being in violation of open-meetings laws.
• Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer says he’s “become a real obsessive about toilets,” adding: “Toilets, toilets, toilets.” The Clippers’ new arena will have a record number of toilets per fan, and Ballmer says, “The architects keep getting on me. You’re supposed to call them ‘fixtures’ instead of toilets. But it’s the same thing. We’re putting a whole lot more toilets than anyone else in the NBA.” Also: toilets.
• Hey, remember this crazy $1.7 billion lotus-blossom-shaped stadium for the Guangzhou Evergrande soccer team? You will be sad to learn that Evergrande is close to bankruptcy and doesn’t even have naming rights to the team anymore, and the stadium now looks like this and may never look like anything more. Unfinished, half-built stadiums are becoming quite the rage in international soccer, which if nothing else is making for some great vaportecture.