Portland Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon gave a long podcast interview on Friday in which he mostly talked about how he’s not a cheapskate, he just genuinely thought towels were a cooler giveaway than t-shirts because that’s how he thought it worked at hockey games. But he also said this:
“When I bought the Hurricanes, all I heard — because I was from Texas — we were going to move the team to Houston. Moving a team is difficult. We didn’t move the Hurricanes. We ended up getting a deal done. We went through the same thing in Portland. Before I even bought the team, I had an agreement with the city and the state. We had an agreement in principle. They’ve already approved half of it. Assuming that all gets done, then this is a non-story. For me, it’s never been really a thing. We didn’t buy the team to move it. We bought the Portland Trail Blazers.”
That’s news, you would think? Maybe not big news — Dundon is not outright promising not to move the team if he doesn’t get his entire $600 million demand in public funding for arena upgrades, he’s just saying “assuming all this gets done” then he won’t move — but still, it’s useful information about where the Blazers’ owner’s head and/or leverage play is at. But aside from one article on the basketball news site HoopsHype, it didn’t even make a single headline, and the Oregonian appears to be the only other publication that even reported on it, way at the end of an article.
Contrast that with Oregonian columnist Bill Oram’s statement last week that “losing this team, be it to Nashville, Austin or Kalamazoo, is not some hollow threat by a greedy billionaire.” Despite the fact that Oram appears to have pulled those city names out of his butt — or in Kalamazoo’s case, whatever part of his brain stores “cities with funny names” — it spawned a flood of press coverage, including a much-reprinted Sportsnaut piece on how “a new rumor suggests” the team could end up in Austin, and one on Michigan news site MLive on how Oram’s mention of Kalamazoo sparked “buzz across social platforms and Southwest Michigan.” (MLive declared that such a move wasn’t “likely,” but that “It’s a reminder that no city is too small to dream big for a day,” which, sure, so long as Kalamazoo accepts that eventually it’s going to have to wake up and realize it’s only in the 43rd largest U.S. TV market.)
The fact of the matter is that the possibility of the Blazers trying to move if Dundon doesn’t get his $600 million in arena money is a threat, yes, but a very vague one, in the “don’t make me come in there” category of things people threaten while hoping they don’t have to decide whether they’re just bluffing. Portland is a bit larger than Nashville, and its arena is only one year older — and Nashville likely doesn’t have the stomach to give an NBA owner major renovation money right after coughing up $1.2 billion for a stadium for the Tennessee Titans. An attempt to move to Austin would likely have the San Antonio Spurs owners up in arms, and other cities have other problems. It’s still conceivable that Dundon would try to move if he doesn’t get any arena money out of Portland; it’s also very possible that, if push came to shove, he’d settle for less than the full $600 million. It’s elected officials’ job to try to find the cheapest price point possible, which some at least seem to be trying to do — and the media’s to report on the whole game of chicken honestly, even if “Are the Blazers moving to Kalamazoo?” makes for better clickbait.
I’m stunned.
That Kamalazoo is market #43.
You have to add in Grand Rapids and Battle Creek, but yeah.
Now I’ll have this song stuck in my head. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liGrckf_FUQ
I immediately thought of this song, and yes, the guy playing the bass is a certain bus driver from Brooklyn, and the piano player had been seen around Gotham City. https://youtu.be/fFv_PoZ2iP0?si=_NvNz-V9viRqGGQU
Threatening to move to Kalamazoo is a bold strategy. Why not throw in Sault Ste Marie as a possible destination too.
Kalamazoo…. right next to Vegas and Jacksonville in market size.
Of course they are going to be a major sports hub. How could they not be?
and there’s Hartford just sitting there at #32. And Greensboro at 46…
Dundon hasn’t revealed much, preferring to let the state and local governments negotiate against themselves. He still may demand a brand new arena. Or full control of a development district with untold subsidies and tax breaks. Crickets so far on length of lease term, responsibility for cost overruns, and all other critical terms and conditions. But when you have all of the local columnists doing your bidding, there’s no need to say much.
The Grizzlies owners would probably also be up in arms regarding a team in Nashville. According to Brian Windhorst and Screamin A. Smith in the video link below, the Grizzlies can block an NBA team in Nashville:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M4bfXgj25jQ
Adam Silver actually wants the Grizz to play games in Nashville in order from them to be “Tennessee’s Team.”
The Spurs have already played two games a season in Austin since 2022.
https://www.espn.com/nba/story?id=48564281&_slug_=silver-nba-committed-memphis-suggests-nashville-games
It’s a theme I’ve touched on before… sports columnists in one-horse sports towns are deathly afraid of losing their relevance (if not their livelihood) in the city and the wider market in the event that their lone franchise skips town. Their instinct to cheerlead for the team and kiss up to ownership — and advocate for huge stadium subsidies while demonizing any bit of opposition to the project at every turn — is a reflection of their personal, base-level desperation.
Whether it’s Bill Oram in Portland, or Mike Bianchi here in Orlando many moons ago, their fears and motivations are exactly the same. They’re not supporting these measures out of love and affection for their respective cities. They’re using their outsized platforms to try and hang onto said outside platforms.
It’s not solely in one-team towns — the ghost of Sid Hartman in Minneapolis says hi — but you’re correct that it does seem to be more intense there.
RIP Sid. What a legend.
To be fair though I don’t think he cared much about “relevance” with the public. If the Vikings or Twins skipped town that meant less time with all his “close, personal friends”
Portland wouldn’t let the Blazers leave. Also with Seattle coming back, I don’t see how Portland leaving would help the league.
43rd-largest market sounds bad, but that is larger than current NBA markets Oklahoma City (47th), New Orleans (50th), or Memphis (51st)
If Oram truly wanted a city with an unusual name, he’d have better options in Rancho Cucamonga, Pocatello, Hackensack, or a full selection in PA Dutch Country (Bird-in-Hand, Intercourse).
San Diego Blazers
No chance. San Diego’s only arena with enough capacity for the NBA is a decrepit old building that has been there, and not renovated, since the Clippers left for LA.
To have a credible threat, Dundon the Dunce would need a city that has an NBA-worthy arena less than 25 years old and far enough away from existing NBA teams that no NBA owner would try to block the move.
Well Nashville is spending a boatload of money to renovate their arena already, so they probably wouldn’t need to do anything extra for the NBA. However, I doubt the NBA would want two teams in Tennessee.
However, you have San Diego who is trying to get an arena figured out. Big market, little competition. Louisville isn’t a big market, but it has an arena and was a runner-up for the Grizzlies. KC has an arena, so that could always be a consideration.
San Diego is probably the only one with a case for getting an extra franchise in its city — maybe even more so than Vegas.
Louisville is just a slightly bigger copy of Memphis, with an even more storied local college athletics program that vacuums up a similarly large share of attention (and ticket and sponsorship revenue) in its own city, and an arena that is entirely too big for a regular-season slate in such a small market (unless they tarp off entire sections like the Jags used to do).
San Diego is a bigger media market than Vegas, but it’s slightly smaller than Baltimore, which hasn’t been considered a great NBA market since right around the same time the Clippers moved from San Diego to L.A. San Diego is basically San Antonio, and each seem to be doing pretty nicely with one major pro sports team — not saying an NBA team in SD would be terrible, but it’s an edge case along with lots of other places, whereas right now Dundon gets Portland all to himself (plus $300m+ in promised state money no matter what the city and county do).
San Diego doesn’t have the NFL anymore, and college football isn’t as big a deal in San Diego as it is in Texas. As I said about Louisville, it’s not that things have to make sense to us. No one would have thought moving from Seattle to OKC makes sense, but look what happened.
San Diego’s problem is that its largest employer is the U.S. Military and last I checked they don’t buy club seats.
I have only been to Louisville twice, and that was more than 20 years ago, so I don’t know much about their economy other than the fact that they are big into horses (literally every room of every building I went in had either a picture or a sculpture of a horse) and bourbon. Also, baseball bats are made there. So I can’t say if they have an economic base. It’s also only an hour from Cincinnati, so maybe they draw from there, too.
That being said if they throw enough money at him who knows. Who figured the NBA would take a team out of Seattle and put it in OKC
It’s roughly 100 miles from Cincy. It’s also roughly 100 miles from Indianapolis, which already has an NBA team. Even if they’re not the same market — and even if I think the whole “regional draw” thing with sports franchise thing is way overstated — the Pacers could claim that any new/relocating team in Louisville would be encroaching on their territory.
This also kinda gets to the broader point I’ve long made about US cities, which is that we shouldn’t think about them so much in terms of the states they’re in as where they’re located relative to other cities, especially for the ones on state borders… like Louisville and Cincinnati and Memphis.
I hate how people think state lines are some magical thing. The reality is people cross them all the time, many metro areas consist of several states. Whether the bears play in Indiana or Illinois has no effect on the general populace in either state. Just like no really cares the New York football teams are in New Jersey.