Ever since private equity goon Bill Chisholm and his goon pals bought majority ownership of the Boston Celtics for $6.1 billion in March, there have been little burbles of speculation here and there that Chisholm might seek to build a new arena somewhere in Greater Boston. This started right after the sale, when NBC Sports Boston asked Chisholm if he’d want his own arena, and Chisholm demurred in that well, you know my birthday is coming up way that sports owners seem to specialize in:
“I really haven’t put much thought into that,” Chisholm said Thursday. “I mean, there have been a lot of banners raised in that location that the Celtics are in right now. So that’s a pretty important part of the history. We’ll get to thinking about that. But it’s also a decision that’s down the road.”
Then, in a blind item in July, Boston Globe basketball writer Gary Washburn upped the ante from “haven’t thought about that” to “is believed to be thinking about thinking about that”:
It’s believed that soon-to-be governor Bill Chisholm will look into the construction of a new arena since the Celtics do not own TD Garden. The most profitable means for an NBA owner in today’s landscape is arena ownership.
This Sunday, the Globe’s business section chimed in, with a long article by columnist Shirley Leung about possible arena sites in Everett, South Boston, and other sundry outskirt locations, anchored by similarly non-sourced assertion that this is surely something that Chisholm would want to explore:
It might seem a long shot that the Celtics would ever leave TD Garden and the North Station neighborhood they’ve called home for close to 80 years. But the team’s new owners are keeping their options open.
Sure, a new arena would be a hefty investment, likely $1 billion or more. But it might be worth it, especially if Boston gets an WNBA team that could fill a decent block of nights alongside the Celtics.
That “might” is doing a lot of work, clearly: Yes, having a WNBA team in addition to the Celtics would add more home games (22 per year) to go with the Celtics’ 41, plus however many playoff games each team ended up hosting. But that’s still going to leave close to 300 nights a year where a new arena would need to book concerts or what have you, assuming Chisholm wants to repay that $1-billion-plus price tag. (Which would likely be considerably more, since he would need to acquire land for the arena as well.)
Washburn’s line that “the most profitable means for an NBA owner in today’s landscape is arena ownership” needs some unpacking as well. (It also needs a better subject noun — “means” of what? — but the Globe isn’t paying us to copyedit.) Yes, all things being equal, it’s better to control your own arena than to rent someone else’s, because you get all the proceeds from concerts and other events. But it’s also better not to be left holding more than a billion dollars in arena debt — which is exactly why the Celtics have shacked up with the Bruins for the last 80 years, so as to split the cost of a single arena rather than duplicating efforts.
We’ve just seen this exact scenario play out, in fact, in Philadelphia, where the owners of the 76ers announced that they would build their own arena to compete with the Flyers‘ one — and then as soon as it was approved, quickly negotiated a deal with the NHL team to instead build a new shared arena. The reason, according to one news report: NBA commissioner Adam Silver “believed that having two competing Philadelphia arena projects in the same timeframe would be detrimental to both the city and the teams.”
Outgoing Celtics majority owner Wyc Grousbeck (he’s still holding on to a minority stake), in fact, said something very similar back when he sold the team to Chisholm in March:
“Honestly, there’s room for one arena in Boston, not two. Because you need to have concerts and events to fill out the bill. And if we ever talked to the Jacobs – we all decided to renovate the Garden very seriously; there have been huge, hundreds of millions of dollars of renovations – but if we ever decide to do anything, I’m sure we’d do it together and have both teams playing there.”
Arena glut is a thing! We’ve seen this in places like Minnesota, where a series of arenas have been built and then torn down when it turned out there weren’t enough concerts to fill all the dates; and even in a market as large as New York City, where the opening of new arenas in Newark and Brooklyn led to the closure of the Meadowlands Arena for lack of business. Boston and Philadelphia are similar-sized metro areas, and it’s not out of the realm of possibility that either could support two arenas — but the fact that Sixers owner Josh Harris backed out of a dueling-arenas scenario makes it less likely that Chisholm would attempt it in Boston, and in what would almost certainly be a less central location for transit as well. (Philadelphia, incidentally, will apparently have no problem fitting a WNBA expansion team in with NBA and NHL teams and concerts all in one building.)
So what’s going on here, exactly? It could be that Chisholm is legitimately kicking tires on the idea of a new arena, either to see if he can bigfoot the Bruins by building an arena that would be the first choice for concert promoters or to see if he can shake loose some public money (or at least free land or infrastructure or tax breaks) to help him turn a profit on his Bruins-killer. (Massachusetts hasn’t historically been the most generous when it comes to sports handouts, but you can’t fault a guy for trying.) Or he could be pulling a Harris by hoping that the mere threat of a competing arena can arm-twist Bruins owners Delaware North into giving him an ownership stake in either the current arena or a new shared one.
Or this could be just newsroom gossip that won’t go anywhere at all. So many options, when you’re dealing with stories with no cited sources! The best advice remains, as always: When elephants fight, keep your hand on your wallet.