The Portland Trail Blazers arena dispute so far in a nutshell: Tom Dundon, owner of the Carolina Hurricanes and past purveyor of predatory lending car loans, bought the Blazers from the estate of the late Paul Allen for $4.25 billion. With four years to go on a short-term lease with the city for the arena that Allen built and then his estate got the city to take over ownership of, Dundon asked for $600 million in city-, county-, and state-funded upgrades, with Dundon himself chipping in nothing on the grounds that he already pays taxes. State legislators said okay, but city and county leaders balked, at which point Dundon sent unnamed team officials to tell reporters that if they didn’t approve this deal, he could demand even more money or else he’d move the team — despite no other cities having expressed an interest in building him an arena, and a lease that prohibits Dundon from even talking to other prospective locations until 2030.
All typical sports venue gamesmanship, so far. But the sports media has lately zoomed in on only one piece of it: Oh shit, where are the Blazers going to move?
- Two writers for The Athletic, after breaking down the basics of the arena renovation funding dispute, launched into a discussion of places the Blazers could move. After ruling out Las Vegas and Seattle since the NBA has its heart set on putting expansion teams in those two cities, they floated Raleigh (too close to the Charlotte Hornets), Austin (too close to the San Antonio Spurs), Nashville (too close to the Memphis Grizzlies), or Kansas City (a good bit smaller media market than Portland). “The case might just come down to which city is willing to offer the best sweetheart deal for an arena and a slew of tax incentives for the Blazers to come,” they report, which is true as far as it goes, but for the small detail that none of those cities are currently offering anything.
- Fox 2 in St. Louis asks if the Blazers could move to St. Louis, noting that while “it’s unclear how strongly the Trailblazers would consider St. Louis as a possible relocation destination, and how much St. Louis city officials are interested,” one of the Blazers’ minority owners is from St. Louis, so it’s “an intriguing possibility.”
- Blazers arena cheerleader Bill Oram of the Oregonian writes that “if left entirely up to me, [moving a team] would be prosecuted as a crime,” but thinks Dundon plans to do it, without specifying where he would take the team to.
Exploring whether the Blazers could actually move is fine enough journalism. But at a time when Dundon and his execs are trying to frame this as “Give me $600m or we’ll shoot this team,” headlines floating destinations where the team could go end up doing the Blazers owner’s move-threat work for him. Portland leaders actually have a fair bit of leverage here — especially with Dundon prohibited by his lease from talking about relocation for now, and with state funding that was already approved expiring at the end of this year — but they’re unlikely to use it if the news media are constantly speculating about other cities allegedly waiting in the wings.
Speaking of leverage, the latest sticking point in Blazers arena talks is a state-of-the-art clause in the team’s lease that — opposite to how these things usually work — requires the team to “maintain the arena in a first-class manner.” Portland councilmember Steve Novick has suggested the city should consider suing Dundon for failing to provide proper arena upkeep if he tries to move the team; Blazers officials say they won’t sit down to talk about a new lease unless the city first attests that it won’t challenge the quality of the team’s arena maintenance. Again, all typical sports lease gamesmanship, and to be expected. The question here appears to be who’ll blink first — and if city and county officials are more afraid of the boogeyman of St. Louis than Dundon is of losing the $365 million in state money he’s already won, that could make all the difference in the blinking calculus.
Has San Diego given up on hosting major league sports other than the Padres? The current big arena (Pechanga Arena) opened in 1966. According to Wikipedia, Stan Kroenke was part of an investment group in 2023 to build a new entertainment district. No doubt he will be looking for billions of dollars to help his construction.
https://timesofsandiego.com/politics/2025/09/25/midway-rising-plan-for-sports-arena-site-clears-planning-commission-hurdle/
Kroenke appears to be in it for the real estate development. Legends is supposed to be the arena developer, if this project ever gets off the ground. The proposed housing would be profitable for sure. I don’t know if a billion-dollar, NBA-worthy new arena would be profitable in a city that has neither NBA nor NHL and is unlikely to get either.
You said what?
While I’m 100% certain that the Blazers won’t move to any of the cities being referenced, or that they’ll actually even move at all, I’m also not sure if I buy the point about the proximity of markets, especially the Southern/Sun Belt ones. It feels like the type of argument people make when they’re too lazy to look past the states they’re located in:
– Raleigh is as far from Charlotte as DC is from Philly
– San Antonio is as far from Austin as Milwaukee is from Chicago
– Memphis is as far from Nashville, both geographically and culturally, as Boston is from NYC
These are pretty obviously not the same markets, and if anything, the rivalry between teams in some of these cities would be far more compelling than the notion of a single franchise somehow “representing” an entire state or region.
Any idea of rivalries being driven simply by proximity ignores so much about what rivalries actually are.
Do the Clippers and Lakers have a rivalry? Did they ever, even when they shared a building?
The Lakers and Celtics have a rivalry (or did) because they played meaningful games against each other, because they had heroes and villains and controversy, and storylines that built the rivalry.
You could put a team in Austin and say, “Okay, San Antonio is our rival because they’re just over there,” but that doesn’t make it so, and it doesn’t make it compelling. It takes time.
Someone has to knock someone out of the playoffs – maybe more than once – or playoff contention. Someone needs to do something crazy in a game. There needs to be a game where there’s a dispute about what happened. Both teams need to come up big in the other’s building more than once. And the results can’t be one-sided.
Charlotte and Raleigh -for just one example – would only have as a common denominator people from North Carolina. I guess there might be some enmity between people from the big city and people from the Triangle, I don’t know. But even that’s not enough to sustain a rivalry.
Your point about a “new” team close to an established one (and the unspoken but often alluded to idea that they’d somehow cannibalize fans or revenue from the existing team) being overstated has some merit. The NBA hasn’t often in recent years (and I’m going back almost 40) put or allowed a move by a team close to an existing one. (The Nets to Brooklyn in 2013 got them from 14 miles from MSG to five, but…Brooklyn. Oklahoma City is slightly closer to Dallas than Boston is to New York, but culturally more distant, as you reference. )
But DC got its NBA team 10 years after Philadelphia got the 76ers (after it lost the Warriors), when the league was very different. Boston and New York go back to the primordial soup days when proximity was helpful because of travel. And Milwaukee got its team two years after Chicago got the Bulls. They weren’t thinking in terms of cannibalizing anything back then.
The biggest things keeping the Blazers from going to [insert city here] are that most cities you could reasonably insert there are not bigger than Portland, don’t have more potential revenue than Portland and don’t have an arena that’s better (even without renovation) than Portland’s.
Which, of course, will not necessarily stop elected officials in Portland from caving. Rich people count on it happening, and usually it does.
Proximity might not guarantee the formation of a fierce sporting rivalry from the word go, but it will immediately play off of existing social, cultural, and/or perception-based frictions that exist between the two cities. It’s all the more intense if there’s a big brother/little brother dynamic between the metro areas (LA and San Diego, Chicago and Milwaukee, Charlotte and Raleigh, Miami and Orlando, and so on) that’s driving the disdain from one or both sides.
A game between teams in San Antonio and Austin might not mean anything to people in places like Detroit or Seattle, but the bragging rights alone will make it a huge deal for people in those parts of Texas.
Lakers-Celtics is an outlier in that it’s a truly national rivalry that’s lasted through multiple iterations of the NBA. Even in a country where most of us think of (pro sports) rivalries strictly through the lens of on-field action, the must-see teams and games can and does change from year to year, let alone decade to decade. Many of the “circle the calendar” type matchups in any given season will still be within geography-based divisions, even in the NFL.
(As a side note, college football is more of an outlier when it comes to national rivalries that have withstood almost a century of changes, though that’s probably going to be diminished dramatically now in this new era — and even as TPTB try to steer the sport toward a more national direction and its regional roots will be diluted to some extent, it will never be fully diminished. The best rivalries imo are still the ones you can feel and interact with on a daily basis with your friends and neighbors and co-workers, and college athletics still has plenty of those.)
You have to think like an owner, given that the owners are the ones with the power to block a move. Don’t look at the location of long-existing franchises. The current owners are not going to kick the Wizards out of the NBA because of their proximity to Philadelphia, or anything like that. Moves that were made a long time ago are not going to be undone.
But if you were, today, the owner of the Spurs, who already play a few games in Austin, you would not approve a new team in Austin. If you were the owner of the Hornets, who probably already struggle to make money from local TV, you would not approve a new team in Raleigh.
It’s reasonable to predict that all of the owners will respect the wishes of a fellow owner about encroachment on their TV and marketing territories (which are defined by the league), unless someone shows us evidence that the owners as a whole are going to vote to defy one of their own by putting a new franchise into an existing team’s territory.
Comparing relatively small metro areas and their proximity to current mid-market teams versus four of the top 10 CSAs proximity to each other and the clear divide between IL/WI (with Chicago the #4 market) seems specious at best.
Raleigh has three big time D-1 basketball programs in the vicinity, one of which shares the arena they would play in.
Nashville seems like they’re focused on MLB.
Someone else is already pointed out the issues with the Austin arena.
But if one of those 3 find a billion or two under the couch cushions, you never know..
There are Louisville, Vancouver, Montreal, and San Diego (which is in the process of putting an arena deal together). There is always a market that will throw cash to get a team
None of those cities have offered any cash to get an NBA team.
Aside from things like the Wizards trying to move to Virginia — which they backed out of because Virginia told them to get lost — I’m pretty sure the only NBA franchise this century to get offered arena money in other city was the Thunder, and that was something of a special case because Bennett’s ties in Oklahoma City. It’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility for Dundon to try to move the Blazers (starting in 2030, anyway), but right now his only offers on the table are 1) $365 million from Oregon plus whatever he can get the city and county to agree to, and 2) crickets.
Louisville’s arena is nice. It also opened 16 years ago which means if it gets an NBA team it’s over halfway through its life expectancy. Kansas City’s (not that you mentioned them) arena is even older btw. Both arenas seem to be doing well in their old age as long as they don’t have a professional tenant, imagine that…
The two Canadian arenas are privately owned, which in America usually means they get the benefits of being publicly maintained while also making all the money off of it (remarkably, that same formula usually applies when the facility is publicly owned, too) but in Canada it actually means the arenas are privately paid for and maintained. Public money is not unprecedented but it’s rare; AFAIK the only significant sports subsidies were by the two Alberta NHL cities to keep their existing NHL teams happy after passive aggressive non-move move threats.
San Diego’s project became a Stan Kroenke endeavor a few years ago. That could hypothetically help them get an NHL or NBA team since he’s already a member of the club but it hasn’t been rumored and both leagues are currently kicking the tires on expansion. Unless the plan has changed the proposed arena was going to have 15,000 or so seats which would be smaller than everything in either league besides Winnipeg.
STL arena recently had 150 mill renovation and hard to imagine how that would top a (purported) new arena elsewhere.
The Spurs literally play home games in Austin. Also that arena is operated by Oak View, the university of Texas basketball team has scheduling priority and Oak View is making crazy money there with concerts. It’s also really small by NBA standards.
Moving to Raleigh is the only thing that makes sense for Dundon since it is his arena- but Raleigh is a terrible market.
With Seattle and Vegas off the table- every other option is worse than Portland. I also think Portland is probably a better option than Vegas.
I think Dundon’s plan is a variant of the pump and dump. With expansion- every team owner is expected to get a check for $400-500 million. Also the prices of Seattle and Vegas will raise the “value” of every other franchise. He bought the Blazers for $4.3 billion. He can flip them in 2-3 years for close to $7 billion plus the $500 million he gets from expansion? Easy way to make $3 billion dollars.
How would Oram know that the owner “plans to do it”?
If this were anything but an in-situ arena cash shakedown, there is no benefit to Dundon talking like this now, some four years out from the end of the team’s lease. Zero.
IIRC, this topic “came up” before he was even approved by the other owners (or at least permitted to advance to the next hurdle…)
If there were other better markets out there to exploit, the best play would be to negotiate quietly in Portland while doing the same with your preferred landing $pot. Take meetings. Make no commitments.
He’s doing the exact opposite of that. It’s a classic shakedown. There is no other ‘bidder’ to house the Blazers.
That doesn’t mean it won’t work… we’ve seen franchise owners make local politicians in all kinds of places look like complete stooges (insert your own joke here…), the Yankees getting money because ‘otherwise they’ll move to New Jersey’ etc.
Go ahead and try to come up with a list of places the Blazers would do better business than they do in Portland. Even the list of marginally viable locations is quite small.
He isn’t getting Seattle or Vegas (which is itself I think quite marginal as an NBA home).
So?
St. Louis, Louisville, San Diego?
Back to Oakland/San Jose (and pay Lacob?)
Second team in Chicago (and pay Reinsdorf)?
Hey! New Jersey should be free territory now that the Nets are in Brooklyn! (although you might have to pay Harris…)
Join Memphis, New Orleans, Charlotte and a couple of other spots as places that have NBA teams but really shouldn’t?
If it is really true that the Blazers’ management has refused to discuss a new lease until the city warrants it won’t trigger the “poor maintenance” clause, then follow their lead.
Refuse to discuss a new lease with the Blazers until 2029. And hand them a list of maintenance deficiencies they need to have rectified before any meeting can take place.
Portland has time on their side. Use it.
Update: Blazers rep at City Council meeting today and says no negotiations until the city drops the “first class condition” clause in the current lease. Basically wouldn’t answer any questions from councilors at all – guess they think they have an advantage, I think it’s time to call their bluff and sue.
https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2026/07/30/in-hearing-blazers-refuse-to-supply-details-of-renovation-unless-city-surrenders-power-to-sue-them/
NC/SC are college towns that barely support NBA hornets; a team in Raleigh would be a bust.
IF there is a move it should be San Diego, Vancouver, Montreal, or Newark.