Search Results for: Wolff to San Jose: Shhh, not so loud

New Seahawks owner says “never say never” on moving team, blames media for accurately reporting what he said

access_time personNeil deMause

Vinod Khosla, who bought the Seattle Seahawks for $9.6 billion last month, was asked by Axios last week if he would “formally commit” to “keeping the team in Seattle long-term,” and while there were lots of fan brownie points to be earned by saying “yes” or at least “that’s our plan,” the venture capitalist billionaire decided to go in a different direction:

“I will never say never. Will this team be in Seattle 500 years from now? But I have no current plans to change anything about the team, including the coach, president, operation or Lumen Field. It all functions well.”

This went over poorly, especially since Khosla is a former minority owner of the San Francisco 49ers and had mentioned in an introductory press conference that he’s a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, after which Khosla griped on X that “reporters will make every molehill into a mountain just to get column inches to write or video minutes.” And Khosla went back on social media to try to put out the fire over his “never say never” remark:

To all @Seahawks fans and @12s, we have no plans to move the team, have never discussed it, haven’t even thought about it. End of story. I’ve said repeatedly we have no plans to change anything. Feel sad for the reporters looking for views and clicks who distort my answer out of context and sent an entire city into a spiral for no reason.

As discussed here last week regarding the Portland Trail Blazers, it’s a tricky balancing act to both declare your love for a city and hold out the threat of leaving if you don’t get what you want, and Khosla is clearly still learning the ropes. (Blaming the media isn’t going to win him any friends there, either, something he’s going to need going forward.) Seattle sports fans don’t sound remotely placated, so clearly this isn’t end of story for them.

As for why Khosla feels the need to hold the move threat stick in reserve, the Seahawks’ lease expires in 2032, and while he has extension options all the way to 2062, he’s presumably at least thinking about what he can demand in exchange for not threatening to leave town six years hence. Any demand for upgrade money from the city of Seattle will be complicated by Initiative 91, passed way back in 2006, which requires the city to get a positive return on investment for any sports subsidies — the way the initiative is written, it doesn’t actually prohibit giveaways to local sports owners, but it does set expectations for how any sports funding will be conducted. Khosla may be thinking about asking for state or county money instead; or he may not be thinking at all, and just needs a new PR handler.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Nobody in media or politics can math or word right edition

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a while since I’ve thanked everyone who makes this site possible through their generous donations, so: Thanks, everyone, who makes this site possible through your generous donations! I hope you are all still enjoying this journey through the world of sports venue shenanigans, if “enjoy” is the right word for it. Sometimes it feels more like a group therapy sessions for survivors of sports fandom (our own or other people’s or both), but there’s value in that too, right?

I’m going to take the fact that you’ve read this far as a “yes.” Let’s get on with the rest of the week’s news roundup:

  • The Kansas City council approved spending $185 million on expansion of the Current‘s (checks calendar) two-year-old stadium yesterday, something that KMBC described as “$185 million in public financing,” which is absolutely wrong: This would be private debt, but repaid by the city, so private financing but public funding — these things matter. Fox4KC, meanwhile, reported that “the project will be funded by revenue generated by the stadium and surrounding development,” which is also wrong: It will be funded by sales taxes on spending in and around the stadium, most of which probably won’t be new to K.C. at all. This is no way to educate the electorate about stadium economics in advance of a public vote on a Royals stadium next spring, when it will very possibly be too late to matter anyway.
  • Los Angeles County has issued an economic impact report on hosting the 2028 Olympics, far too late to be used to determine how much to spend on the event, but oh well. My eye was immediately caught by the prediction that “the 2028 Games could boost tourist spending by $1 billion above and beyond a typical summer,” a curious conclusion given that actual studies of past Olympics, including Atlanta 1996, Salt Lake City 2002, and London 2012, have found that spending overall doesn’t rise during an Olympics, in large part because locals flee town during the Games. From what I can tell from the county report — turning my laptop sideways to read it because the county doesn’t know how to rotate PDFs properly — consultants HR&A didn’t actually conduct an in-depth spending study, just plugging Olympic visitor numbers into the off-the-shelf IMPLAN software package, because “garbage in, garbage out” is how HR&A rolls.
  • NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly says the league is talking to three different potential Atlanta expansion team ownership groups — because what did that fictitious Einstein guy know, anyway — plus also Austin and maybe Phoenix “with the right location” or maybe expansion “might not happen” at all, Bill Daly clearly got an A in playing hard to get at deputy commissioner school.
  • The Brook Park city council has declared the area around the new Cleveland Browns stadium blighted, which Mayor Edward Orcutt says “gives us the opportunity to be able to maintain this site in the future,” another way of saying “lets us keep spending money on the stadium ad infinitum,” somebody clearly got an A in doubletalk at mayor school.
  • Throw another $60 million on the fire for San Antonio taxpayer spending on a new Spurs arena, this time to acquire land for the project. This brings the public cost total to, you know what, I don’t feel up to mathing today, let’s just call it an even squillion dollars.
  • Residents of Chicago’s Bridgeport’s neighborhood this week protested a proposed Amtrak maintenance facility that could be built there as part of a land swap for a new White Sox stadium, with local alderman Nicole Lee saying, “f the Sox move and we’re left with a 24/7 rail maintenance yard and an empty stadium, we’re done for here.” Team execs, meanwhile, are distancing themselves from minority owner Justin Ishbia’s stadium plan, issuing a statement saying only, “If the site proves viable, it would be added to the locations up for consideration for a new ballpark, along with The 78 and other options.”
  • Judging from my inbox, a lot of you are really excited to see the latest renderings of a new Philadelphia 76ers and Flyers arena, so here, go to town. I’m mostly interested in whether they include fireworks (nope) and how they handle the question of which players’ jerseys fans will be wearing when the place finally opens in 2030 (one part guys currently on the team, one part guys like Charles Barkley, hey remember when he was a Sixer?).
Share this post:

MLB expansion talk focuses on Salt Lake, other cities with major question marks

access_time personNeil deMause

With the Athletics seemingly settled on setting the Fisher family fortune on fire in Las Vegas, and Tampa Bay Rays owner Patrick Zalupski about to receive the spendiest gift stadium in history, the thoughts of bored baseball writers are turning toward expansion. Sure, there’s the little matter of a new union contract first, which could have monumental impacts in terms of incentives for MLB expanding or not. But league commissioner Rob Manfred said he wants expansion cities picked out by the time he retires at the start of 2029, at least before then saying maybe there won’t be expansion after all, so sure, let’s survey the field of candidates.

This week, we’ve had ESPN’s Jeff Passan, Yahoo! Sports’ Matt Larter, and Sportsnaut’s Lincoln Zdunich all chiming in with their lists of prospective expansion cities. Let’s go through the possibilities — since the three can’t agree on a ranking, let’s do it in order of TV market size:

Montreal: Being in Canada, Montreal doesn’t actually appear on the Nielsen market size list, but it’s pretty damn huge: There aren’t directly comparable numbers, but it looks like if Montreal were in the U.S. it would fall around 14th, between Seattle and Detroit. It also doesn’t have either a workable MLB stadium (unless you count the re-refurbished Olympic Stadium, which MLB probably wouldn’t) or a prospective owner in place; Passan notes that “at the forefront of the latest push is Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, the owner of WatchMojo, and he sees himself more as a facilitator than the money man for a bid.” (I’ve now read a fair bit about WatchMojo, and still can’t figure out exactly what it does, which makes it a very 2026 candidate for sports ownership, or at least sports ownership facilitation.) Montreal also still has all the same other issues as when the Expos left, like a sometimes-weak Canadian dollar. Larter calls Montreal a “longshot”; Passan includes it in his top six; Zdunich doesn’t mention it at all.

Orlando: The largest U.S. market without an MLB team, something local team advocates mention at every possible opportunity. It’s also only 84 miles from Tampa, which looks like it will have the Rays to kick around for the foreseeable future, and sure, that’s only a little less distance than Philadelphia is from New York, but Tampa-Orlando isn’t anywhere near as big a combined market as NYC-Philly. (Tampa already swiped Orlando’s prospective lead investor, Rick Workman, as a Rays co-owner, Passan notes.) It’s also in Florida, where MLB expansion franchises go to suffer league-bottom attendance. Orlando does have a name picked out (the “Dreamers”) and a plan for funding a stadium, albeit one that has been rejected by local officials so far. Passan insists that MLB owners “will consider it”; Zdunich says MLB would be concerned about an Orlando team siphoning off fans from Rays and Miami Marlins fanbases that can’t afford to lose any, but that “the Dreamers have time to improve their proposal until an expansion committee is convened” — maybe by moving Orlando to a different state?

Raleigh: North Carolina’s second-largest media market (behind Charlotte) seems to have taken a leap past its neighbor to the south recently, if only because Carolina Hurricanes and Portland Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon has expressed interest in owning a baseball team there, which gets MLB owners salivating. North Carolina doesn’t have a stadium plan (though it’s funded other teams’ projects before), and it has the disadvantage of splitting its population among three markets (Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham, and Greensboro) that would each be among the smaller metro areas in MLB. Passan says it’s “punching well above its weight” without really explaining why or what that means, while Zdunich calls it the “surprise frontrunner” while noting “the only remaining roadblock would be [stadium] funding,” which is kind of a significant hurdle.

Portland: Has an actual stadium plan with $800 million in promised public funding (allegedly from player income taxes, though that’s unlikely to work out without dipping into existing public money) and a group eager to land a team, though one without a billionaire on hand to pay the expansion fee. It’s also on the West Coast, and Manfred has said he’d prefer to add one team on either side of the continent, which gives it a leg up on the larger East Coast cities, but not on one smaller West Coast city, supposedly.

Nashville: Like Orlando, it has a team name picked out (the “Stars”). It’s less than two-thirds the size of Orlando, though, and has even less of a plan for a stadium, with public funding unlikely to be coming soon after Nashville emptied its stadium budget for the Tennessee Titans. The consensus opinion appears to be that Nashville’s time as a frontrunner has passed, if the consensus opinion really matters here.

Salt Lake City: On the face of it, Salt Lake seems like a bad place to put an MLB team: It’s the smallest market on this list, and while it’s been growing fast, it’s also running out of water and facing a future of toxic dust clouds. But it does have two things MLB really likes: a prospective owner (the Miller family, former owners of the Jazz) and a plan to spend $900 million in public money on a stadium, though not specifically where the $900 million would come from. This is enough to make Passan call it “by far the most advanced potential bid”; Zdunich writes that “Salt Lake has been known as a sports town for a while,” though that’s another way of saying it already has a lot of teams (NBA, NHL, MLS) for a smallish city.

In short, MLB has a bunch of imperfect expansion candidate cities (San Antonio, Sacramento, and Vancouver didn’t even get mentions this week, but they’re still out there). And while the league can — and certainly will — play them off against each other to see who comes up with the most lucrative bid, beyond a quick infusion of expansion fee cash and possibly some stadium money, none seem like they would significantly increase the league’s revenue going forward, certainly not enough to make up for giving up a 1/32nd share of national TV and streaming and other revenues. This financial calculus is the main reason MLB hasn’t expanded yet this century, and it hasn’t changed much, though the soaring sale prices of sports teams as North America fills up with multibillionaires presumably has at least some baseball owners salivating for a quick cash infusion, even if it would only come to a couple hundred million dollars per existing owner.

Going back to that Marc Normandin article from February that I linked to above, he wrote at the time:

As I put it back in 2023, “As much as the current 30 owners would love to split some 10-digit expansion fees, they’d also love to be able to threaten to take off for Nashville or Charlotte whenever they aren’t getting as much taxpayer money as they’d like for a new stadium or renovations of an old one. And if new teams fill those slots, well. Threatening to move to Manchester, NH just doesn’t carry the same weight, you know?” And while a market as small as (and as bumping-up-against-Boston as) Manchester might never actually be on the table, somewhere like Las Vegas is a whole lot easier to put up with, media-market size-wise, if the Dodgers, Yankees, et al are subsidizing it a bit. “We can’t put teams in another market the size of Milwaukee” doesn’t hold up when you have a revenue-sharing model that makes Milwaukee work better than it already does.

That’s true, but it also means that going into collective bargaining agreement talks that will include discussions of how teams share revenue, big- and even medium-market owners may not want to saddle themselves with even more people in the owners’ club who don’t bring much to the table other than a one-time check and an expectation to get a big chunk of MLB.tv revenue into the distant future despite not providing many new eyeballs of their own. We don’t know without a fly on the wall inside the owners’ suites; it would be nice if access journalists like Passan would use their contacts to suss out what the jockeying for power within MLB really looks like instead of just passing along what certain insiders want repeated in print, but I guess that’s the kind of reporting that is less likely to get you continued access.

Share this post:

What does $4B Angels sale mean for team’s stadium future, MLB expansion plans? Some investimagations

access_time personNeil deMause

Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno announced yesterday that he is selling the team to Los Angeles Rams/Denver Nuggets/Colorado Avalanche owner Stan Kroenke, and most of the news coverage has — rightly — focused on Moreno not letting the door hit him in the butt on the way out. Moreno, a billionaire billboard baron, bought the Angels in 2003 from Disney for $180 million, and since then has: angered locals by changing the name of the team from the Anaheim Angels to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim to try to appeal to more fans from the populous city to the north; squandered the presence of the best player of his generation by surrounding him with every overpriced, washed-up free agent he could find; tried to obtain $500 million worth of city land around his stadium for only $150 million, and almost getting away with it until the whole thing blew up in an FBI bribery investigation; and declaring that fans don’t care about winning after conducting a survey that didn’t include “winning” as one of the choices, among other lowlights. By this season, fans were openly chanting “Sell the team!” at home games, and it was apparently enough for Moreno to cash in his chips and sell to the Walmart-heir-by-marriage up the road at a huge profit.

Even as fans exulted in Moreno’s departure, some expressed concern about what a new owner — one who already broke the Rams’ lease in St. Louis so he could move them back to L.A. (The Athletic terms this a “proven track record” in stadium development, which is certainly one way of looking at it) — might mean for the Angels’ future. The team’s lease expires in 2032, though ownership has a series of one-year options that could extend it to 2038. And that juicy stadium parking lot land is still sitting there, though complicated by the fact that the state’s Surplus Land Act requires public property to be considered first for affordable housing before it can be devoted to other uses, something the city of Anaheim already paid a $96 million fine for ignoring once.

In addition, just last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law the Home Run for Anaheim Act, which requires the team to revert to being called the Anaheim Angels in any future lease negotiation or land sale agreement (CORRECTION: Only if the team first gets an exemption from the Surplus Land Act), which may or may not matter depending on whether Kroenke shares Moreno’s obsession with the L.A. name. The 79-year-old Kroenke inherits a stadium situation that is ripe for either opportunity or extortion, depending on how you look at it, and his track record for playing hardball in such matters should encourage Anaheim officials to sleep with one eye open, at least.

The other potential fallout from the sale involves the price tag: We don’t know how big a stake the “controlling interest” is that Kroenke is buying from Moreno, but we do know that it values the entire franchise at a new-MLB-record $4 billion. Coming on the heels of the San Diego Padres‘ sale for a $3.9 billion valuation, this is a sign that there are still plenty of billionaires willing to shell out top dollar for MLB franchises. That’s likely to whet league owners’ appetite for cashing in by creating two expansion teams; even if the available open markets are underwhelming and adding teams would just dilute existing owners’ shares of national TV contracts, it’s got to be tough to pass up a cut of what could be a pair of $4 billion or more checks. With the Athletics and Tampa Bay Rays stadium situations now seemingly settled — though we’ve said that before — the next step may be setting up a bidding war among the Portlands and Nashvilles and Salt Lake Citys of the world, to see if any wants to pay enough toward a new stadium to help an expansion owner afford that multibillion-dollar expansion fee. All the kids are doing it!

 

Share this post:

KC to spend extra $7m a year on paying off Royals bonds just to avoid public vote

access_time personNeil deMause

The Beacon ran a long article late last week about the Kansas City Royals stadium proposal that includes a bunch of worthwhile analysis of the deal, including why using taxes from in and around the stadium isn’t really the project “paying for itself.” (“Some ballgame attendees might be going to a Crown Center restaurant instead of a Waldo restaurant that day. That shift in economic activity within Kansas City is a net neutral from a tax revenue perspective.”) But the most interesting part is buried many paragraphs down, in a discussion of the type of bonds the city plans to use to borrow $600 million for stadium costs and why:

Kansas City intends to issue these Royals bonds as “special obligation bonds,” as opposed to revenue bonds or general obligation bonds. That means that the city is essentially promising to pay back a certain amount of money every year…

If the city wanted to get a lower interest rate, it would have needed to take the stadium proposal to a public vote — either for a sales tax as Jackson County did or for general obligation bonds, using property taxes.

The going interest rate for K.C.’s special obligation bonds, reports the Beacon, is 5.725%, compared to 4.25% for general obligation bonds. Applied to a $600 million loan, this means that Kansas City is going to be spending about $7 million a year extra on stadium bond payments in order to avoid a public vote. That’s money that, if it were used to finance other city spending, could cover about $117 million in different public needs, if the city had gone the voter-approval route for the Royals project. But you can’t put a price on not letting the people vote, or rather you can, and that price is $117 million.

In other evading-democracy news, meanwhile, Mayor Quinton Lucas’s rush to get a Royals deal down on paper before anyone could try to force a public vote seems to have run afoul of another small matter: the residents of a 33-story apartment building adjacent to the stadium site who say the project would be infringe on their property rights, and who are now suing to block part of it.

According to the lawsuit filed Monday in the Jackson County Circuit Court, the [San Francisco Tower] condominium’s association is seeking a temporary restraining order and an injunction against three defendants — the city of Kansas City, the Royals and Crown Center — for protections over its longtime easements and property rights.

Some of the property rights include:

  • An approximate 0.835-acre central mechanical plant and maintenance shop;
  • A transformer and primary switchgear rooms;
  • Utility tunnels, including a 24-foot-wide tunnel under Grand Boulevard;
  • A pedestrian bridge;
  • A 400-space parking garage
  • A passage over San Francisco Garden.

The association states that plans for 68-acre ballpark district show the tower surrounded, as well as the stadium approximately 100 feet from the condo’s entrance.

All this building infrastructure is on Crown Center property, but the condo association says it has easements in place guaranteeing it the right to use the property for this stuff. The residents say they’ve been trying to negotiate with Royals execs, the Crown Center, and the city since May, to no avail, and so are seeking a restraining order and injunctions against the part of the project that would infringe on their rights, though they’re not seeking to stop the project overall.

This is all pretty embarrassing for Mayor Quinton Lucas not to have addressed sooner, but then, crossing all his t’s in a timely fashion doesn’t really seem like one of his core strengths. Lucas said yesterday that he “will support all parties in reaching an amicable resolution whether through the Court’s declaration of rights outside the stadium footprint, as sought here, or through alternative dispute resolution.” No word yet on whether an injunction might have any impact on the inevitable lawsuit over whether a public ballot measure will be ruled to come too late to overturn the stadium plan, assuming voters give it a thumbs-down; governance is too important to be left to the masses, which is why we instead leave it to bond financiers and city lawyers, apparently.

Share this post:

San Antonio council votes not to let city residents vote on $489m in Spurs arena funding

access_time personNeil deMause

The San Antonio city council has completed its hearing on Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones’ proposal to put a measure on the November ballot on whether to devote $489 million in city money to a new Spurs arena, and their verdict is nope:

The San Antonio City Council batted down Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones’ attempt to get the city’s funding for a downtown Spurs arena onto the November ballot in a 5-6 vote Monday morning….

Opponents of another vote argued that the money is either restricted in how it can be used or relies on the project moving ahead in the first place.

The vote’s outcome was not a surprise; a majority of council members publicly voiced their opposition shortly after Jones floated her idea in a July 31 memo. Still, Jones held a series of public “listening sessions,” and pushed ahead with bringing the issue up in Monday’s special council meeting.

KSAT describes the $489 million as coming from “the Spurs’ lease of the publicly owned arena, private developers’ lease of nearby city-owned land, property tax from that development within a specific area known as the Hemisfair Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone (TIRZ), and hotel-related state taxes from a ‘Project Finance Zone’ (PFZ)”; the city’s term sheet helpfully doesn’t break down how much would come from each source. It’s the sort of thing that might have to be included in a ballot measure, but we’ll never know now.

As for why the six deciding councilmembers said they voted no, councilmember Misty Spears said it would be bad for business to establish a precedent that voters should have a say on major spending decisions, while councilmember Marc Whyte said prior to today’s meeting that holding a vote on whether to spend $489 million on a Spurs arena would cost too much at a time when the city is trying to reduce spending. The other four no votes can try to top that, but it’s going to be tough.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: County commission approves $100m in Blazers arena money, doesn’t actually have $100m

access_time personNeil deMause

One of several remaining shoes dropped in the Portland Trail Blazers arena renovation saga yesterday, as Multnomah County commissioners voted 4-1 to approve team owner Tom Dundon’s term sheet for $100 million in county funding for the project. Or maybe just half a shoe, as three of the five commissioners voted not to use $35 million in county taxes from the sale of the Blazers to Dundon to pay for the county’s costs, and the commission doesn’t have a substitute source of those funds. “How real is this commitment for money, if we can’t agree on a way to fund it?” asked commissioner Meghan Moyer, the only no vote. Next up is the Portland city council, which yesterday debated its own term sheet and failed to come to any agreement; several councilors said the term sheet needs more revenue going to the city and more costs being paid by the team, with councilor Angelita Morillo (last seen during Wednesday’s stadium economics webinar, a recording of which is now available online) arguing: “We are not in a negotiation, we are in a hostage situation. How does adding amendments to this term sheet make it worse?”

And in this week’s non-Portland news:

  • San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones wants city residents to get to vote this November on whether to spend $489 million in city funds on a new Spurs arena; councilmember Marina Alderete Gavito argues that a majority of city residents already voted in favor of a Spurs arena funding referendum last year; sports economist Geoff Propheter says that’s “silly” reasoning given that that vote was on county spending on the arena, not the city’s larger share. Voters are split on whether to vote, reports KSAT, or at least whichever voters were at yesterday’s public listening session were split. Maybe there should be a city vote on whether to take a city vote? Somebody should vote on that.
  • The Kansas City Planning Commission unanimously approved zoning changes for a new Royals stadium. The plan must next go to the city council, which also has to find $600 million in city funds to help pay for the public’s $1.35 billion share of a $1.9 billion stadium — details!
  • The owners of the Orlando Dreamers (note: not actually owners, because the Dreamers aren’t an actual team yet) are still asking Orange County to approve using $975 million in tourist tax dollars to build their non-team a new stadium. “Investing $975 million and getting $32 million a year, we lose money in that investment as a return,” replied Michael Poole of the county’s Tourist Development Tax Citizen Advisory Task Force. “Where can you help us make up that loss?” An excellent question, but I have another one: Do the Dreamers really plan to build their lineup around a 52-year-old Johnny Damon?
  • The Cleveland Guardians‘ stadium needs repairs to its elevators and hot water tanks, and its public owner doesn’t have the tax money to spend on them. If only there were someone around who’d already received at least $300 million in public money to help build and improve the stadium and could be asked to help chip in, hmm.
  • FIFA management told World Cup 2026 host cities that they’d get $1 million in payments to spend on soccer infrastructure and other “legacy” projects, but has so far stiffed them. Can you really say you’re surprised?
  • The latest Denver Broncos stadium renderings are all of people out and about enjoying new neighborhoods while the stadium itself is just a shapeless egg — seems like somebody’s got the message that people would rather their tax dollars go to things that they don’t have to buy PSLs to access, even if the lesson they’ve learned is “Shhh, ixnay on the uxury-boxes-lay.” Denver Gazette sports columnist Mark Kiszla is eager to lend a hand, with a long column saying it would be a “grave mistake” not to give Broncos owner Greg Penner what he wants, in which Kiszla calls the stadium’s proposed Burnham Yard site “blighted,” “dusty,” “a dump,” and “dilapidated” — everybody drink, several times!
  • Vancouver is “ready to build [a] new ballpark” for an MLB expansion team, according to a talkSport article that is actually about how the city authorized a local real estate developer to try to propose a way to do so, which isn’t the same thing at all.
Share this post:

Arenas that have lost NBA or NHL teams turn out to have done just fine

access_time personNeil deMause

For anyone who holds to the belief that sports fans are mindless boosters who want their elected officials to keep their beloved team owners (or just beloved team’s owners) happy no matter what the cost, I present you with Blazer’s Edge, the SB Nation fan site for the Portland Trail Blazers. Site editor Dave Deckard yesterday did something that the rest of the local media hasn’t yet: He assigned a reader/contributor who goes by the handle BlazerTag (possibly Ryan Whitledge, who used to host a podcast by that name) to investigate whether the Blazers leaving town would really result in an economic and fiscal catastrophe for Portland, with the city left with “a skeleton building, unused and rotting.” And the answer is: If the experience of other cities is to be believed, Portland would be just fine.

The former NHL home of the Arizona Coyotes has been without its anchor tenant since 2022; they’ve moved onto the greener pastures of Salt Lake City. To see how bad the finances got in the immediate aftermath, let’s hear from Glendale City Manager Kevin Phelps.

“The venue (Desert Diamond Arena) smashed its all-time record for revenue after the (Coyotes’) departure,” Phelps said. “The next year, they beat that number by almost $10 million.”

Glendale, you may recall, had an especially horrific lease with the Coyotes, under which the city had to pay the team to play there. Portland, meanwhile, has an especially horrific lease with the Blazers, under which team owner Tom Dundon doesn’t pay any rent or share any arena revenues.

At the peak of their popularity, the Warriors left Oracle Arena in Oakland for a new facility in San Francisco: the Chase Center. So what happened to Oracle (now called Oakland Arena) when the Warriors left? It had its best fiscal year ever and reduced its operating deficit by 97% between 2019 to 2023.

The Bay Area doesn’t have a ton of arenas — it’s basically the Warriors’ new arena in San Francisco and their old one in Oakland (not counting San Jose, the South Bay is really a different market [EDIT: or maybe one market but a really sprawly one or 1.5 markets or something, see comments if this is important to you]) — so getting the Warriors out of the way has been a blessing in disguise for the Oakland arena. Nobody ever talks much about San Francisco as an NHL expansion or relocation market despite its huge population, and this is likely one of the reasons. (The last attempt going extremely poorly would be another.)

KeyArena turned a bigger profit than it ever did with the Sonics. It happened the same way it did in Glendale and Oakland when their anchor tenants left: by freeing up the stadium revenue the sports teams were hoarding for themselves.

It goes on like that, but you get the idea. This is, in fact, a common theme in arena finances: Having an anchor tenant for 40 nights a year is nice, but not so nice when they’re not paying rent and are taking away dates that could be used on concerts that would. It’s still not especially likely that Dundon moves the Blazers, but it does seem that he needs Portland more than Portland needs him.

BlazerTag then summed up with a couple of paragraphs that reflect a position I’ve heard over the years from lots of sports fans who are all too aware they’re also taxpayers:

I’m aware of the sorrow that awaits if no Moda deal is struck. I understand the emotional stakes, but I won’t let them blind me to the cold, hard financial truth.

“Moda Center will crumble without the Blazers” is Stockholm syndrome reasoning from a fanbase being held hostage by ownership. It’s misinformation that I will not suffer.

Blazer’s Edge also did some tea-leaf reading recently of the recently revealed internal Blazers emails in which team lawyer Zandria Conyers suggested just not answering city questions publicly, because “I don’t think our public answers will be well-received.” Deckard noted that while the pissiness was not great, “it was not the kind of nonchalant dismissal one would expect if the organization had already checked out of the process,” which is very true. “The good news: the Blazers do appear to be seeking public funding for the arena for real, which means moving doesn’t seem to be their first option,” concluded Deckard, and while that’s probably stretching the meaning of “good news,” it does argue against the conspiracy theory that Dundon bought the team just to move it, which is better than nothing.

Share this post:

Where will Tom Dundon move the Trail Blazers? Probably nowhere

access_time personNeil deMause

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.

Share this post:

Hearing to get public feedback on Royals stadium shut down early after public gives too much feedback

access_time personNeil deMause

Representatives of the Kansas City Royals and the Crown Center Redevelopment Corporation held a required public hearing on their rezoning proposals for a new Royals stadium complex yesterday, and and they absolutely heard from the public:

“We already said no to a downtown baseball stadium, and here it comes back again,” said Mary Ellen Vincent, a Roanoke neighborhood resident. “[It feels like] a trick, like they went around us, and they’re going to jam this through no matter what we say.”

Roanoke neighborhood resident Olo Szylleyko, shared her concern about bypassing a public vote and raised broader economic concerns, pointing to mixed results at stadium developments in other cities.

“You have to look in other cities and you see what are the pluses and minuses of this type of enterprise and how much money they actually been spent by the taxpayers and by the owners,” he said. “We’re looking at this as an absolutely perfect success. We don’t know that.”

And:

“I think a lot of us are really excited for the development,” said Ben Lindner, board president of the San Francisco Tower Association. “We’d love to see some new life being breathed into the Crown Center area, but this plan seems to create more questions than it’s answered.”

And:

About an hour into the meeting, as the last remaining speaker was at the podium, members of the Missouri Workers Center erupted in chants of “let us vote.” The progressive labor advocacy group broke out in chants and heckled speakers….

The meeting ended about 15 minutes early. During a question-and-answer period, when presenters addressed prescreened questions from the crowd, a host announced they would end the meeting amid the ongoing outburst.

(You can see the “Let us vote!” chants here. Nobody seems to have gotten video of any heckling or the announcement to end the meeting, so it’s hard to tell how disruptive it was; KCTV did an entire lengthy report without even mentioning that the hearing ended early, though it’s always possible their reporter didn’t stay till the end.)

The Missouri Workers Center, you will recall, has collected signatures to put a vote on the stadium plan on the November public ballot, to which Royals officials have responded, pretty much, “ha ha, not if we get all the approvals first!” And whether or not the rest of the attendees approved of the chanting — “a lot of people were at the wrong meeting,” groused one local resident — the general sentiment seems to have been that Kansas Citians have multiple concerns about the project that they would like to have addressed. This should be no surprise to anyone, given that at past public hearings residents have raised questions about the public cost (unspecified as yet, but likely $1.3 billion or more) and that the city is pushing this plan forward after voters overwhelmingly rejected another public funding plan for a Royals stadium in 2024. It’s almost like people in Kansas City want some way for their opinions to be heard beyond writing down questions and having team officials pick and choose which ones to answer, hmm, there must be some provision in democracy for doing this, can’t think of what that would be right now.

Share this post: