NBA owners certainly seem to be grasping at straws to find a way to raise the price of an offer for a potential Seattle Sonics expansion team.
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The latest apparent attempt was highlighted by Bloomberg on Wednesday with an article reporting the difference in expected value for a potential Las Vegas franchise and one for Seattle:
NBA owners, who have the final say on expansion, are concerned that adding a Seattle team might not produce the desired financial return, according to people familiar with the process who were not authorized to speak publicly about the negotiations. One owner said he had to weigh expansion fees and the distribution of media rights revenue with the dilution of more teams and talented players. Vegas’ potential payout also exceeded expectations, while Seattle is a question mark, according to the owner.
The report adds that bids for a Vegas team “are expected to reach $10 billion,” which would give $330 million to each of the current 30 NBA teams. A bid for a Seattle team, meanwhile, is expected to be in the $6 billion range, which would bring in “a high end of around $200 million per club,” according to Bloomberg.
It’s not the first sign that the NBA is trying to cast doubt on whether Seattle will be awarded a team when the league’s owners vote by the end of this year on whether to accept offers and expand specifically to Vegas and the Emerald City. And in my opinion, it’s pretty obvious what the league’s owners are doing, which is doing whatever they can to raise the costs of a Seattle team.
The situation in Las Vegas is unstable, which is actually better for the NBA. There would be three groups vying to win a team in Vegas, and that competition means the prize goes up. Vegas, on the other hand, doesn’t have a ready-made arena for a new team. And it’s very different from Seattle.
There’s one group that’s far and away the favorite to win a Seattle bid, and the main reason is that the group — One Roof Sports and Entertainment, led by Seattle Kraken president Samantha Holloway and also owner of the NHL team — controls Climate Pledge Arena, which opened in 2021 and was built with the NBA’s return to Seattle as one of the main goals.
The value gap between Vegas and Seattle “is partly due to a lack of competition in Seattle, where Samantha Holloway has dominated discussions and driven out other potential bidders, according to some people familiar,” Bloomberg reported.
Any competing bid for a Seattle team would either have to go through One Roof to gain access to the Climate Pledge or build its own arena elsewhere in the region, and that certainly doesn’t appear to generate any real interest outside of BlackSun Private Equity, which has proposed building an arena on Tulalip tribal land in Marysville (more than 30 miles north of Seattle) and appears very unlikely to be a real challenger to One Roof.
There was speculation that losing bidders for a Vegas franchise might turn to a Seattle franchise, but that never seemed grounded in reality. In fact, Wednesday’s Bloomberg report said that “people familiar with the process say it’s more likely that losing bidders” for a Las Vegas team could join the One Roof group “in a sponsor role.”
There is no indication that any of this has shaken One Roof.
According to Bloomberg, “A person familiar with (Holloway’s) thinking said his group is in active dialogue with the league and remains committed to bringing a team back to Seattle.”
Meanwhile, when NBA Commissioner Adam Silver addressed NBA expansion a little over two weeks ago on The Pat McAfee Show, he seemed to talk about it as a probability. He also allayed some recent concerns that Mexico City could compete with Seattle for a team at that time, saying the league going south of the border was “not in the immediate plans” but “going forward, I think there’s real potential there.”
I think it really comes down to this: One Roof has done the work to become a viable pick for an NBA expansion team in Seattle, but in doing so, it has created leverage over the NBA that doesn’t exist in Las Vegas’ situation. So the league’s owners are simply looking for a way to exert their own influence when it comes to awarding a Sonics franchise to a group that has all its ducks in a row.
In every round, One Roof played ball. And if the losing bidders for a Vegas team want to join the One Roof cause, that just means more money to support the effort to enroll a Sonics team in the Climate Pledge.
I think there is a pretty clear solution.
If NBA owners doubt that an expansion franchise in Seattle isn’t worth it financially, just say what the number has to be to make it so.
Ultimately, I think that’s what the league will do. These rumors and reports attempting to sow doubt about Seattle being a viable location for an expansion team appear to be nothing more than attempts to drive up the price of a team for a group that has no real competition.
And at this point, there’s no reason to think One Roof won’t be ready once the NBA is finally ready to name its price.
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