When this story from USA TODAY’s Scooby Axson and Lorenzo Reyes broke last week, you could hear the collective yawns of basketball nation from coast to coast:
The NBA‘s ownership group has approved the vote to explore adding two new franchises, with expansion team applicants exclusively for the Seattle and Las Vegas markets, the league announced Wednesday, March 25.
“Today’s vote reflects our Board’s interest in exploring potential expansion to Las Vegas and Seattle – two markets with a long history of support for NBA basketball,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said Wednesday, March 25, in a statement. “We look forward to taking this next step and engaging with interested parties.”
The drumbeat to return the SuperSonics to existence has been loud and proud pretty much since the OG version vacated tht premises for the cache and promise of Oklahoma City nearly two decades ago and reached a crescendo when the Thunder came away with last season’s title. And considering that Seattle is a substantially larger television market than OKC, don’t think that the league doesn’t share the sentiment of disenfranchised Pacific Northwesterners.
The argument for Las Vegas is perhaps a more unsettled one. On the one hand, the league already has a substantial presence in the market. The NBA Cup title game has found what appears to be a permanent home, a recent All-Star Game weekend did quite well and its WNBA Aces have won two of the last three league titles. But as Axson and Reyes reminded, they would hardly be the only novelty act in a DMA that’s roughly the same size of Oklahoma City:
If Las Vegas is approved, the city would be home to all four major North American sports, with the expansion Vegas Golden Knights starting play in 2017 in the NHL, the NFL’s Raiders moving from Oakland in 2020, and the Athletics also moving from Oakland to start its first MLB season in Nevada in 2028.
And since the Knights’ early success–a Stanley Cup finals appearance in its inaugural season and a Cup of their own in year six–has set the bar quite high (and to basketball hardcores, the Aces’ degree of success only adds to it)–the idea of a yet another expansion team trying to extract dollars in a sport where unlike football there’s a need to have sustaining appeal to an economically challenged residential community for weeknight home games isn’t, well, a sure bet.
But on Monday we got this note of something else that’s been brewing for a while via THE ATHLETIC’s Jason Quick:
The NBA Board of Governors has approved the sale of the Portland Trail Blazers to a group led by Dallas businessman Tom Dundon, the league announced Monday…Dundon, who is also the majority owner of the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes…is known for spending the majority of his resources on players; he took the Hurricanes from one of the NHL’s lowest payrolls to the sixth highest. His decisions are often driven by analytics, and he is a fierce negotiator, eventually securing $300 million in public funding to renovate the Hurricanes’ hockey arena, which led to him signing a 20-year lease…In Portland, the Blazers are seeking $600 million in funding to renovate the Moda Center, a city-owned building that has had minimal upgrades since it opened 31 years ago.
Ever since it was announced months ago that Dundon was the future of the Blazers the market has been rampant with conspiracy theories that he’s likely to take them to Raleigh to join the ‘Canes, starting with the simplistic rationale that both teams’ primary colors are red and black. But pro basketball has struggled in North Carolina, with the checkered history of the Hornets/Bobcats and the failure of even Michael Jordan to breath life into them a grim reminder that creating a natural rival for a franchise that only recently has even returned to modest relevance isn’t a great idea.
On the other hand, Dallas might indeed be ready for a shakeup. Mark Cuban has left the building, and the Adelson family that he stuck them with have their own roots in Las Vegas. And thanks to the trade of Luka Doncic there is a very deep rift with them and Big D that not even the fortuitous drafting of Cooper Flagg seems able to mend.
Maybe the Vegas market might be better served by relocating a team with a decades-long track record and an NBA championship on its resume–essentially what Oklahoma City got with the SuperSonics–by having the Mavericks relocate there? With the Blazers–with a similar CV to the SuperSonics and a dedicated brainiac owner with similar qualities to Cuban–ready to slide in as a replacement?
If you’re about to raise a red flag and say things aren’t quite equal–especially since the Blazers are now coming up on a half-century since Bill Walton brought them a title–you’d arguably be right. But then again, the NBA has precedence for how to deal with something like this, as SPORTS KING.com’s Dave Manuel authored in June 2022:
Did you know that in 1978, the owners of the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Clippers (then the Buffalo Braves) swapped franchises?…In April of 1972, Irving Levin and Harold Lipton bought the Boston Celtics for $3.7 million…Irving Levin wanted to own a team in California, and he wanted to move the Celtics there…The NBA, however, would never allow that, so Levin concocted a back-up plan…How about if he and Lipton swapped their shares in the Celtics with John Y. Brown, Jr. and Harry T. Mangurian, Jr., who owned the shares of the Buffalo Braves?
The plan was agreed to by the league, with the provision that the Braves be allowed to move to San Diego, where they would become the Clippers (eventually they would move to Los Angeles after getting purchased by Donald Sterling)…In addition, the Celtics and San Diego Clippers agreed to a large trade – Freeman Williams, Kevin Kunnert and Kermit Washington for Tiny Archibald, Billy Knight and Marvin Barnes.
Maybe, say, Scoot Henderson or Shaedon Sharpe winds up in Las Vegas to join Flagg and what’s left of Kyrie Irving thereby giving the market a couple of good reasons to have hopes for more immediate success?
And as for the other expansion slot, there are plenty of worthy candidates out there that all of a sudden now get back into consideration. How’s about Mexico City, which regularly sells out its regular season game and opened its hearts and its wallets for Flagg last fall? What about Tampa, which had a COVID-impacted romance with the underperforming Toronto Raptors when Canada was even more draconically shut down than we were? They managed to draw a sellout crowd under challenging cicrumstances before conditions and the team worsened enough to where the balance of the season was played in isolated obscurity. It also happens to be a DMA about the same size of Seattle. And if three NBA teams can work in Texas, they can certainly work in Florida.
As for our friends in Portland, well, just ask any of them who they root for feverishly in baseball and football and hockey. The new SuperSonics will more than fill whatever void might exist, and the league could always mandate that they play a handful of games in Portland. Owning the entire Pacific Northwest (Vancouver included!) can only help make their marketing process all the more desirable.
It hurts when I write this, knowing how many good friends I have in Oregon. But they’ve never been to any Blazers games recently–and given the team’s recent track record I can’t say I blame them. If you were laying bets for Adam Silver and company, you’d be wise to avoid these reds and blacks.
Courage…