Amid the ongoing staredown over $235 million in city and county funding for Portland Trail Blazers arena renovations, the news media dropped a slew of articles this weekend on the latest developments, such as they are:
- The Oregonian (reprinted at MSN without a paywall) asked all 12 Portland city councilmembers what they want out of a Blazers deal, and, surprising no one, they all want a deal, but disagree on what the city should give up to get one done. “It’s unclear whether at least seven councilors will vote together on the outlines of the deal, which is expected to undergo significant revisions in the coming weeks,” concluded the paper. (Councilmembers’ complete answers are here.)
- The mayors of 24 Portland suburbs sent a letter to city, county, and state officials urging them to cut a deal with Blazers owner Tom Dundon, though they didn’t specify what kind of deal, urging negotiators “continue to ask hard questions and negotiate professionally while acknowledging the deep mark your decisions will make on your neighbors, as well as the overwhelming commitment already made by the surrounding region.”
- The Athletic devoted a long article to statements by two unnamed Trail Blazers sources, one of whom said, “I think we are very far apart” on a deal, calling last week’s term sheet proposing that Dundon pay $3 million a year (and rising each year) in payments in lieu of property taxes “a non-starter” and adding, “I don’t know why they sent it to us, because they know very little of the stuff we would agree to. They are playing politics at this point.” (The Athletic, incidentally, appears here to have violated the Society of Professional Journalists’ guidelines on use of unnamed sources, which caution, “When someone asks to provide information off the record, be sure the reason is not to boost her own position by undermining someone else’s, to even the score with a rival, to attack an opponent or to push a personal agenda.”)
- One of the Blazers sources also alleged that the city’s “delay” in approving an arena renovation deal could lead Dundon to demand even more, including possibly asking for an entirely new arena, see if he doesn’t!
- Oregonian columnist Bill Oram, who has been insisting for months that Dundon will move the Blazers without arena subsidies, quadrupled down on that Friday in a column titled “Portland may need to keep the Trail Blazers here against Tom Dundon’s will,” writing that “the city’s job is to lock the door and throw away the key. Not let the new owner skip town with Portland’s most precious civic asset.”
That’s clearly the game of chicken here: How much can Portland officials push back on Dundon’s demands without him picking up the team and leaving when his lease expires in 2030? What makes it weird is that Dundon hasn’t so much as dropped hints about moving the team — his only direct statement on the matter has been, “We didn’t buy the team to move it. We bought the Portland Trail Blazers.” (Even one of the Athletic’s unnamed team sources passed up the chance to make a move threat under cloak of anonymity, saying, “No one with the Blazers has ever said we want to move. We don’t want that. We want to stay in Portland.”) And while Blazers president Dewayne Hankins did hint at a move threat in May by saying, “if city and county leaders can’t get a deal done, the Blazers’ lease at Moda Center will expire in 2030,” by not actually saying out loud where else the Blazers might go or what kind of deal Dundon could expect to get there, Portland leaders are left bidding against ghosts, which is to say bidding against themselves.
Add up all the latest breathless news coverage, and there isn’t much new: Portland officials still don’t want to give away the store to Dundon, team officials still want them to. At this point the likely impact of all the media handwringing is to influence what pressure city councilmembers — especially swing votes, whoever they may end up being — feel to cut a deal, and how much they’ll hold out for. Ultimately, in so many of these negotiations, the end game ends up coming down less to ethical principles than to haggling over the price.
UPDATE: The Blazers’ current lease says that Dundon “shall not relocate or seek to relocate the playing site of its Home Games … without the prior written consent of the City, which may be withheld in the sole and absolute discretion of the City.” This would indicate that Dundon can’t even seek to talk to other cities until 2030 — which would explain why he’s biting his tongue now, but not so much why Oregon officials (and sports columnists) are acting like a new lease deal is urgent.
Not that this wasn’t already (or always) the case, but anytime ownership of a sports franchise changes hands — especially in smaller markets like Portland — the attention immediately turns to whether that owner will move the franchise elsewhere. That most of them don’t have anywhere they could actually move to is beside the point; as Shad Khan proved for years in Jacksonville, to name one recent example, you only have to make people *believe* that there’s a bigger, more lucrative market that it could call home instead.
A lot of the times, the owners and the franchises don’t even need to go through the “efforts” of making vague statements and non-threats themselves. Simply by closing on the purchase, they can send the local politicians scrambling for answers and local sports media into panic mode. Dundon isn’t doing anything new or inventive; he really only needs to exist and make sure he’s at least lurking in the background.
The whole “he must be slow-walking the negotiations because he really wants to move the team” rumor is especially weird. Portland elected officials and media are pulling out all the stops to hold a gun to their own heads and threaten to shoot.
Why would he *not* want to move the team?
He’s not from Portland. He’s shown no inclination that he GAF about Portland. Or, for that matter, the Blazers. I believe he is on the record saying he bought them because they were for sale, which is the same reason he bought the Canes.
As far as I can tell, both Seattle and Vegas are bigger markets.
Or he could sell the team tomorrow and make a nice profit.
This ESPN pod suggests that Adam Silver and the owners accepted the possibility that the team will leave Portland when they let Dundon buy the franchise. There were other bidders more loyal to Portland.
Without trying to do a galaxy brain conspiracy theory on why employees of ESPN, one of the NBA’s most loyal partners, would say that, I think it’s probably true as far as that goes. The NBA owners could have steered the Allen Estate to sell to somebody who definitely would have kept them there. Instead they let a Carpet Bagger buy them. They knew what they were getting into.
https://youtu.be/ibdUb_ogMyI?si=2_LpjShNiWHIU6sU
Las Vegas is absolutely a smaller market than Portland, by a factor of about 1.4:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260713145103/https://ustvdb.com/seasons/2024-25/markets/
Seattle is bigger than Portland, and has a more recently rebuilt arena than Portland. Dundon would also be the second tenant in Seattle, behind the Kraken. Would that be enough to make him prefer to be top dog in Oregon? Would it be enough to make him prefer to be top dog in Oregon if he could get something less than $600m, but more than nothing? These are interesting questions, and ones there’s plenty of time to figure out before Dundon’s lease lets him start considering a move in 2030.
Thanks. I just googled the population figures, so I didn’t want to vouch for their veracity.
I agree with Brian Windhorst that the NBA may want to stall picking a bidder in Seattle and Vegas in order to give Dundon (and maybe a few other owners) leverage in their current arena negotiations. But I don’t think they’ll stall four years.
Upon further thought, I don’t think he could actually move the team to either of those two markets. Because both of those markets have at least one ownership group – in the case of Vegas, it is many – looking to own a team there. I don’t think they’re going to be looking to accommodate this guy moving a team there. So he’d have to build his own arena. Good luck with that.
But the league needs to make it seem like a threat.
He could, potentially, sell the Blazers to one of those groups if the owners decide they don’t actually want to expand. I don’t know about all of that either. It sounds like they want to go to 32 teams and charge $2billion or more for the expansion fee.
Yes, if he wants to move to one of the two proposed expansion cities, he’s going to have to be willing to compensate the other owners for the theoretical market in which they do not have a team.
I think that is unlikely, unless Seattle or Vegas want to cover the cost of doing so.
I don’t think they will wait for the subprime car loan king to work out his arena deal for four years either. But so long as it “works”, they can let him use that theoretical leverage. Maybe he just enjoys having people like Oram stuff their heads up his backside in the meantime.
Did you mean to say Portland is larger then Vegas?
Ugh, yes, too many double negatives. Will fix.
Has anyone ever just flipped a team they just bought? Even Jeffrey Loria owned the Expos for three years.
That was the example I was thinking of. Three years is a short time.
Oram seems to me to be the type of sports columnist that used to be standard-issue for every paper in a decent-sized market: the guy who just gets off on hammering an issue, whether it’s fire the coach or predicting doom or whatever it is.
Is it theater? Does he really believe this nonsense?
(And I’ve been to Portland. I’m not sure the Trail Blazers are its “most precious civic asset.” It’s a basketball team. Bill Walton’s not limping through that door.)
Or, if you’re someone like Mike Bianchi in Orlando, you just fire off hot takes on the daily about anything and everything.
If you’re a sportswriter for a local newspaper in a small market, they are a “precious civic asset.”
“A precious civic asset.” Not “most precious.” Very few sports teams are. In fact, if your sports team is your most precious one, you’re doing city wrong.
“In fact, if your sports team is your most precious one, you’re doing city wrong.”
Or maybe you live in Green Bay ;)
Oh right, he wrote “most precious.” I cannot imagine many Portlandians will agree with him.
What I meant was that sportswriters tend to vastly overrate the importance of the teams they cover to the cities they serve.
To do otherwise would be to admit that what they do for a living is really not as important as they might want it to be.
As a former boss told me “Where you stand often depends on where you sit.”
Agreed that some Portland politicians and media types seem to be panicking. On the other hand, it’s easy to see why people think Dundon is a scumbag who can’t be trusted to keep the team in Portland.
I wouldn’t trust any sports team owner to keep their team anywhere. The question is always whether they have any better options, and right now for Dundon the answer appears to be “not yet.”
Anyone googling (or doing actual research for that matter) on the new Trailblazers owner…
“…has been under investigation by attorneys general in multiple states over predatory lending practices, and has settled lawsuits in several states…”
Sounds like a fine partner for any municipal government, doesn’t it?
BTW, the Portland Trailblazers are not a civic asset.
I know that because some jackass named Dundon just ‘paid’ over $4bn for them. That means he owns them, not the city and not the fans.
Nobody cares about that sort of thing anymore. As a society, we are post-shame.
Dundon has a few options. The easiest is to allow expansion to take place. Pocket the cash, then sell the Blazers at a grossly inflated price brought on by what the bidders paid for Vegas and Seattle. He walks away with $500 million from expansion plus the team being “worth” $1.5-2 billion more than what he bought it for.
The dumbest timeline but the funniest would be he joins forces with Dolan to stop expansion. This gives him a lot more leverage with Portland cuz he can dangle Vegas and Seattle as relocation options. Sells the team before the next tv deal craters franchise valuations.