This has been quite a week already for Dallas sports franchises announcing arena plans without quite committing to them: On Monday, the Mavericks owners declared that they had “entered into option agreements” to maybe purchase 104 acres at the former Valley View Mall site in north Dallas to use for a new arena. (The total price hasn’t been made public, but 20 acres of it would cost $50 million. The Mavs owners are putting down about $200,000 a month to hold the option open.) The project would also — if the team owners go through with the purchase, and then build it — possibly include “a vibrant mixed-use destination anchored by a state-of-the-art arena, along with restaurants, entertainment options, public green spaces and family-friendly experiences.”
Just 24 hours later, Stars owner Tom Gaglardi announced that he, too, was absolutely thinking about the possibility of considering moving to the site of a shopping mall, maybe, this one in the eastern suburb of Plano:
Tuesday, the Stars announced that it submitted a signed, non-binding letter of intent for a proposed sports and entertainment district at The Shops at Willow Bend.
The team said that the proposed mixed-use development, being advanced jointly with Levin Holdings & Cawley Partners and Centennial, could include sports, entertainment, retail, dining and public gathering spaces “anchored by a future Dallas Stars arena.”
“This project would present a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our franchise,” said Tom Gaglardi, the Dallas Stars’ owner, governor and chairman. “We eagerly await the vote by the Plano City Council and look forward to continuing the conversation to be part of the redevelopment of The Shops at Willow Bend.”
Neither an option agreement nor a nonbinding letter of intent — sorry, a signed nonbinding letter of intent — is a promise to do anything, of course. First, Gaglardi needs the Plano council to approve some niceties like, what exactly would those be?
According to the letter of intent, the city is expected to contribute up to $700 million in funding toward the project from TIRZ revenue and other available funds. Development costs for the arena are expected to be around $1 billion.
Ah, $700 million, a small detail! A TIRZ is Texas’ version of tax increment financing, where any rise in property taxes on a site is kicked back to pay off the bonds that built the project getting taxed, a kind of fiscal perpetual motion machine that it takes either advanced economics or the wisdom of Oscar Madison to see through as still being public money. In fact, the TIF district the city of Plano is considering would cover more than 900 acres; the city would also own the arena, while the Stars would get every lick of arena revenue. (Whether the team would pay any rent is yet to be negotiated.) The $700 million, according to an agreement the Plano council is set to vote on Monday night, only includes “public infrastructure,” while “interest on debt” is listed as TBD, making it unclear if this is $700 million worth of public bonds or $700 million in tax revenues over time plus interest or what.
(For those just tuning in for the first time: The Mavs and Stars currently both play in an arena that is just 25 years old, but which both team owners have decried as obsolete. Sports marketer Craig Sloan of Playfly Sports explained this as “it seems like the life cycle of a stadium or arena is moving towards 20 to 25 years,” which isn’t really an explanation, though economist Rod Fort’s suggestion, also from 2001, that “I don’t see anything wrong, from an owner’s perspective, with the idea of a new stadium every year” might be.)
On the Mavs side, meanwhile, the team’s casino-operator owners, who have previously expressed interest in building a combined arena and casino complex in Dallas, notwithstanding that casinos aren’t yet legal in Texas, now insist that they’re thinking of nothing of the sort:
In a statement to The Dallas Morning News on Tuesday, Welts reemphasized the absence of gaming elements from the team’s plans for a new entertainment district, including a new arena, corporate headquarters, practice facility, hotel, retail and dining.
Asked if those plans will change in the future, Welts said, “No, our plans will stay consistent with no casino component.”
Nobody is saying how much public money would go into a Mavs arena district, though the Valley View site already sits in a TIF district, which could provide a chunk of Dallas city property tax money to start things off. Assuming that all these options are actually actualized, which is just as TBD as any potential public costs. First step: Monday’s vote in Plano, then we’ll see where the remaining chips fall.
The arena is 25 years old but already obsolete. I just can’t even. It is horribly depressing seeing these counties and cities just wave away money. I read the article about how exactly, are they obsolete. “GenZ wants a communal experience where they can wander around and be social anywhere” then go to a park and go for a walk. I go to a game to watch the game, the less bells and whistles the better. I just want good sightlines, a craft beer that isn’t $18 and thats about it.
Baseball has went to that business model. A few thousand seats for $200+ per game, lots of suites for hundreds of thousands and then some cheap tickets for the young who will only sit in outfield bars and drink overpriced beer. The amount of decent seats for those who simply want to watch the games are decreasing with each new stadium.
It’s the owner’s right to charge for their product but I don’t understand why politicians think those of us who aren’t rich and are too old to drink beer all night should subsidize it.
> I don’t understand why politicians think those of us
> who aren’t rich and are too old to drink beer all night
> should subsidize it.
That’s easy. Billionaire team owners who get favors are a lot more likely to cut checks for re-election campaigns than the hoi polloi.
You would think, but there isn’t much correlation between campaign contributions and support for sports subsidies. It’s more that billionaire team owners can afford to hire lobbyists and convince their other business friends to talk up public stadium funding at all the right parties.
Given the rapidly decreasing lifetimes of modern stadiums, they should more accurately be described as a four-or-five-times-in-a-lifetime opportunity to raid the public coff— oops, I mean to provide bold visionary transformative renovation.
The Stars seem to do well selling out their arena but it seems insane to me for them to build their own and Dallas have three competing arenas for things like concerts.
I get that they don’t want to share revenue but anchoring an arena district by yourself is hard enough normally and about a thousand times harder when you’re the fourth most popular team in your city -and it could be argued they’re actually the fifth.
The only recent move I can think of where an NBA or NHL team left an NHL/NBA arena situation was the Sixers trying to build in Market East, and that at least made sense. It was in the heart of the city, surrounded by entertainment and dining options blocks away, on top of the subway, and Philadelphia is at its heart a basketball city whose professional sports love happens to be for football and to an extent baseball. If not for the opposition, the Sixers would probably currently be building their Market East arena.
The Stars are doing everything in the complete opposite way the Sixers did. They’re the lesser team when compared to the far more popular and established NBA. They’re not moving into the heart of the city but moving out of it into a giant suburb. They’re trying to build an arena district out of scratch in said suburb that does not have anywhere near the dining and entertainment options the heart of a city does. Everything about it is completely illogical.
The decentralized nature of Dallas and Texas in general makes the Mavericks’ plan more feasible than that of the Stars but it’s still a longshot.
As for the age of arenas, at some point we have to collectively decide that there’s no more upgrading to be done. They had an argument with the lack of luxury boxes. I’m fully okay with that argument. They had an argument with sightlines and other logistical issues that genuinely affect both revenue and fan experience.
Once they build this new wave of arenas, it need to stop. No more new arenas until they’re 50+ years old if that.
The only rationale that I can think of is that the NHL as a league, and hockey as a sport, feels like the most white suburban-coded out of all the “major” sports (at least in the US). And in places like Dallas, the suburbs themselves are growing rapidly enough that they’re becoming local hubs unto themselves, sort of like the city away from the city.
But as you said, a move into a giant suburb still represents a move away from the main population center of the region. The Braves *kinda* made it work by moving from Atlanta to Cobb County because that’s ostensibly where the fanbase was — and that’s the only way I see the Stars’ move working out (if it happens).
I don’t have any inside information, but from afar this smells like a fight for supremacy between the two franchises, which will most likely end with the two of them sharing one arena, as in Philly, on whatever terms the one that comes out on top can extract.
Or maybe they each get a bunch of tax money to build dueling arenas, discover there aren’t enough touring concert acts to go around, and then ask for more bailouts because they’re not making enough money. That would be sort of hilarious, but mostly not at all.
Yeah that’s exactly what I’m thinking. I know the Mavs sued them to kick them out of the partnership and take full ownership of the arena but I have a feeling this ends with them sharing a new arena on updated terms.
It is gonna be a fascinating situation to follow regardless though.
The Sixers-Flyers relationship was easily as ugly going in. Remember that time they printed the corporate name of their arena on their court in a tiny font size because the Flyers were getting all the naming rights money?
Oh I definitely remember.
And I remember the Flyers backing the protests And pushback against the new Market East arena. It was all pretty ugly.
I was pretty shocked when they agreed to share a new arena but it opened my eyes to how ruthless business struggles between two groups can be with them still being able to come together after ugly campaigns against each other.
I think in this case, they have no choice. As rich and populated as the northern part of Dallas and its nearby suburbs might be, they definitely can’t sustain two NHL or NBA capacity arenas.
It takes more than just money and population to sustain even one arena let alone two. The only way it really works in the suburbs is if the team itself is such a draw due to sustained winning that nobody cares where the stadium is.
Yeah, it betrays a civic truth that sports franchises don’t often like to acknowledge: teams based in multi-sport markets don’t actually like each other, they don’t truly wish the others well when the other teams are on deep playoff runs, and are actively competing against each for attention and affection (and revenue and business/corporate accounts) in their own cities.
The Boston Bruins’ most hated rivals aren’t the Canadiens; they’re the Celtics. The Cardinals and the Blues made a whole show of “unity” when the Rams left St. Louis, but deep down, they were both happy as hell that they had one less team to compete against in their own market.
The 76ers and the city of Philadelphia would have destroyed the city’s Chinatown to build in Market East. That attempt at ethnic cleansing fueled opposition to the arena. Local news reports readily acknowledged the Chinatown angle.
Lol here we go.
First of all, the arena was nowhere near Chinatown, which starts multiple streets north of there.
Second, ethnic cleansing? Seriously?
Third, the only people destroying Chinatown are the gentrifiers moving there and to Callowhill. Don’t try to pretend to care about the neighborhood now.
You’re wrong about “nowhere near Chinatown” — the arena’s NE corner was going to be on Filbert and 10th, which is exactly one block south of the Chinatown arch, a block that is mostly Asian businesses.
https://www.ocfrealty.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Slide-07a.jpg
Lol I’m very familiar with Chinatown.
This arena however would have been entirely in the heart of Center City, blocks from Independence Mall and from City Hall in the other direction.
Where Chinatown is actually losing land is in the north. That’s the irony of people not from Philly talking about how it would be erasing Chinatown. They’re the ones doing it in the first place by renaming so much of it Callowhill and causing prices to spike. In fact, some of the people heavily involved in those protests were transplants to Chinatown who were part of gentrifying it.
They do not care in the slightest about Chinatown.
It’s possible the Stars feel they can replicate the recent on-ice success of the Florida Panthers, who play in a hockey-only arena far from the city center in a no-income tax state. Former Marlins president David Samson recounted on his podcast today former Panthers/Marlins/Dolphins owner Wayne Huzienga believing people in South Florida wanting him to fail in a non-traditional hockey market after he moved the Panthers out of Miami after an agreement to share an arena with the Heat couldn’t be reached. Ironically, Samson said it was prepostorous that South Florida has two competing arenas. Given that the suburbs north of Dallas are booming, it’s unlikely this will be another Glendale.
The skepticism is warranted, given that the Metroplex already has countless “restaurants, entertainment options, public green spaces and family-friendly experiences” and adding more of those next to an arena doesn’t seem like anything special. The Mavs’ proposed site is adjacent to an already-existing Galleria mall complex.
There is probably money-making potential for one centrally-located state of the art new arena in or near Dallas for basketball plus entertainment events — the Mavs are presumably looking at Chase Center in SF as a model for that, given that they hired Rick Welts. But two would be overkill.
“This project would present a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our franchise,”
By lifetime he means 15 years until he gets tired of this ‘once in a lifetime stadium’ and asks for a new one.
This is very similar to the Braves moving to Cobb County. As the metroplex has grown- all the money is in Collin County and the north Dallas suburbs. What makes the AAC obsolete is its location. The Stars and Mavs are just moving closer to their season ticket holders (and both teams hate each other which is why they’re going for two seperate arenas).
Probably a great then for the AAC- it’s still capable of hosting concerts and can now charge a premium while those other arenas have popular weekend dates filled with the Stars and Mavs
There is no way Dallas has enough concert bookings to fill three arenas, even with two of them hosting basketball and hockey 40 nights a year each. The metro region is only a little larger than Philadelphia, where the teams were antsy about even being able to fill dates at two arenas.
The concerts would go to the AAC. The debt heavy Stars and Mavs arenas would be charging too much and have limited availability.
I think this ordeal probably ends with one team up north and the other in a renovated AAC, but the Metroplex is a strange place when it comes to concerts. Since Dickies opened in Fort Worth it’s been getting a lot of the prominent arena tours while the AAC gets younger acts, more rap and R&B. Open dates at the AAC probably takes shows Dickies while a new venue(s) in the north get shows skewed towards older whites, Asian and South Asian Americans.
Comparing it to Philadlephia isn’t really accurate. The Metroplex is much wealthier but spread out. Philly has a geography problem where it’s very skippable when it comes to certain acts.
Fine, do you prefer Houston as a comp? After the Toyota Center was opened, the Summit didn’t take advantage of all its open dates to book concerts, it turned into a megachurch.
Are there any metro areas with three ~20,000-seat arenas all going head to head other than NYC, L.A., and Las Vegas? None come to mind.
Well the Woods Pavilion in The Woodlands gets acts that play arenas in other cities. Sugarland built a smaller arena that gets sizable acts.
A reason that Houston dropped their AHL team was because the Toyota Center needed weekend dates. It’s also why there hasn’t been a realistic push for an NHL team to share the arena.
Are you sure it isn’t just because Houston can’t support hockey?
Bay Area, Neil? SF, Oakland, and San Jose each have an arena.
The Bay Area is technically two different metro areas, but sure, it’s similar in total population.
I don’t know if this has already been mentioned, but SFGate did a piece on the Oakland Arena doing well because it has more open dates without teams:
https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/oakland-arena-pop-music-mecca-22267168.php
Hey everyone settle down it’s going to be vibrant!