Category: Philadelphia Flyers

I figured eventually we’d get one of those insider journalism articles about why the Philadelphia 76ers owners switched from a planned Market Street arena of their own to sharing a new building with their current landlords, the Flyers, I didn’t figure that “eventually” would mean two days, but here we are. And the answer — or at least one answer — appears to be “NBA commissioner Adam Silver got his billionaire friends together to have them kiss and make up”:

On the afternoon of Dec. 1, Sixers managing partner and co-owner Josh Harris, who is also managing partner of the NFL Washington Commanders, hosted a group of sports business heavyweights at the football team’s home game against the Tennessee Titans.

The group included two other Sixers co-owners — David Blitzer and David Adelman — as well as NBA commissioner Adam Silver and Comcast chair and CEO Brian L. Roberts…

Silver, who has served as NBA commissioner since 2014, believed that having two competing Philadelphia arena projects in the same timeframe would be detrimental to both the city and the teams, according to the sources.

There’s some logic to this: Silver has an interest in the health of the Sixers, obviously, but his league is also business partners with Comcast, the Flyers owner, which just signed an 11-year broadcast deal with the NBA. Having the two teams each fighting for Philadelphia arena supremacy could only end up with one side or another losing, so by brokering a deal Silver is just shoring up ruling class solidarity and monopoly power.

The question remains, though, why Sixers owner Josh Harris took the bait. He seemed all-in on a Market East arena as recently as last month, so either something changed his mind about that, or that was always a dodge to get Comcast (and Silver, as it turned out) to the negotiating table, or Silver truly has the power to cloud men’s minds. The Philadelphia Inquirer article laying out the commissioner’s role doesn’t include any quotes from Harris other than those from his press conference on Monday, which are PR mush along the lines of “We didn’t really change our mind. Actually, we were really committed to Market East, but … our north star was doing the right thing by Philly.”

The Inquirer article is evasive about its sourcing for the entire chain of events, citing only “sources familiar with the matter,” which could always mean that this story is what somebody wants to push as a narrative more than actual, you know, reality. The closest to a named source it provides is Philadelphia Building and Trades Council leader Ryan Bower, who says Silver “put [the team owners] together” and “I’m sure that that partnership [between the NBA and Comcast] played a lot in this decision that you see now.” This all amounts to intriguing hints, but is far from the deeply investigated timeline that one would really want; maybe once the Athletic has successfully gotten its union recognized, it can devote some time to putting together all the pieces here.

It’s Tuesday morning, and here’s what we know about the plans for a joint Philadelphia 76ers–Flyers arena in South Philly:

• Sixers owners Harris Blitzer and Flyers owners Comcast Spectacor have entered into a “binding agreement” to go halfsies on a new arena to replace the Wells Fargo Center, which Comcast owns (and recently renovated) and Sixers rent. The new arena, which doesn’t yet have an announced price tag, is planned to open in 2031.
• The two companies will also work together on the “revitalization” of the Market East site near Chinatown that the Sixers had previously targeted for a new arena of their own.
• Comcast will buy a minority stake in the Sixers, and will get full ownership of the naming rights to the new arena.
• The Flyers owners will join the Sixers owners in seeking a WNBA team to play in the new arena.
• Mayor Cherelle Parker called this development a “win, win, win, win for Philadelphia” and a “curveball that none of us saw coming” and “exciting” and “unprecedented” and “a celebration for the city” and said as the city’s “CEO, I don’t have the luxury of wallowing in this 180.”
• Parker said the city will still spend $20 million on affordable housing initiatives in Chinatown, though it sounds like the $50 million in community benefits promised by Harris as part of his original arena deal is now kaput.

All this still leaves a lot of questions: What will the “revitalization” at Market East look like, and will it still be eligible for the property tax breaks that were approved for the previously planned arena? What will the previously announced arena district in South Philly look like, when will it be built, and will Comcast and Harris seek any tax breaks or public infrastructure money for that? Who’s paying who for what in all these new cross-ownership deals, and how certain is it that any of these new plans will come to fruition? (City councilmember Mark Squilla, who played a key role in approving the now-suddenly-dead Market East arena plan, said when asked how he knows the new arena will actually happen, “I mean, you don’t. I mean, they say their commitment is there, there’s a little trust building that needs to be done.”)

In an editorial late yesterday afternoon, the Philadelphia Inquirer called the last four years spent on the Market East arena plans “a giant waste of time and money for everyone.” That’s not quite true: It was clearly time and money well spent for the Sixers owners, who were able to use the threat of their own arena to get Comcast to the table to work out this new deal. Whether it can now really be a “win, win, win, win” for the city, Sixers, Flyers, and whoever else Parker had in mind is going to depend on a lot of details that are currently unknown; once the excited press conferences die down and we start seeing financial details, we’ll know better who exactly got played here, and for what.

Billionaire Philadelphia 76ers owner Josh Harris, who has already proposed building a $1.3 billion arena in Center City near Chinatown using no public money except for property tax breaks and possible state funds that could actually amount to a whole lot of public money, on Friday had one of his fellow execs announce that they would happily host the Flyers at their new home as well:

“We’d love the Flyers to come, we’re having discussions with them. We don’t know what will happen,” [part-owner David] Adelman said. He added that “hopefully [the proposed arena] aligns with [Comcast’s] goals as well.”

For the Flyers to move makes zero sense on the face of it: Not only is the hockey team currently in the middle of a $300 million renovation — conducted by Gritty, apparently — to add things like (checks) uhhh, themed bars, but agreeing to become the Sixers’ tenant rather than being their landlord at the current arena seems like a definite downgrade.

But then, there’s a lot that doesn’t make sense about this new arena plan. Sure, one generally prefers to be the landlord than a tenant, but is it really $1.3 billion better (less whatever subsidies the Sixers owners end up extracting)? Especially when having two major arenas fighting for the same sports and concert market — and each having to pay off their own pile of construction debt — is just going to make each of them less lucrative? Adelman told the Philadelphia Business Journal that the ownership group is “willing to accept lower than market returns on this project” because they see the new arena as a “social mission” that “can be a catalyst for Philadelphia,” all of which is nice PR glurge, but there’s a big difference between “lower profits than we could potentially get by spending the money elsewhere” and “throwing money down a hole that we’ll never see back,” and there’s plenty of evidence that an arena gamble like this could end up the latter.

The most plausible explanation for the Sixers owners’ move, really, is as a scheme to try to displace the Flyers at the top of the Philadelphia arena heap. We’ve seen this tons of times before: It didn’t make much sense, for instance, to build a new Newark arena for the New Jersey Devils what with the old Meadowlands Arena still drawing concerts nearby, but once the Meadowlands was shut down, the Devils had a monopoly on that market. It’s the concert-industry equivalent of the pre-Amazon days when Barnes & Noble would open an outlet right across the street from a successful local bookstore: In the short run, there may not be enough customers to go around, but if you can be the last store standing, you’ve just seized somebody else’s business without having to go through the trouble of buying it.

If that’s what the Sixers owners are up to — and this latest invite to the Flyers to come bunk with them makes it seem likely, though it could also always just be more PR glurge meant to counter Philadelphians’ questions of “Why do we need another new arena exactly?” — then it’s an awfully big risk in the hopes of getting to be the big dog in the Philadelphia arena market. Which, if the Sixers owners were just gambling their money, then it’s their money, but once they’re asking for tax breaks and the right to mess up Chinatown, it becomes the public’s problem as well.