Adam Silver Addresses Trail Blazers Sale and Arena Plans, Chauncey Billups' Status

📍NEW YORK — The sale of the Trail Blazers to Tom Dundon is not official yet, but this week, it passed one of the last major checkpoints before the expected closing date of March 31.

Dundon and two of the partners in his group, Andrew Cherng and Marc Zahr, were in attendance at the NBA's annual spring Board of Governors meeting, along with outgoing Blazers leadership in Jody Allen and Bert Kolde, to present their final sale agreement and plans for the franchise to the board's finance committee. The last step is a formal vote of the other owners to approve the sale, which is expected to pass before the end of the month.

At his press conference in a meeting room at the St. Regis hotel in midtown Manhattan, NBA commissioner Adam Silver gave his initial impressions of Dundon and the Blazers' new ownership group.

"I'm just getting to know Tom," Silver said. "I've known him by reputation for a long time, not just through his ownership of the Carolina Hurricanes, but also through the other sports investments he's made. He's a go-getter, he's got a great reputation from having led a turnaround in the NHL. He has enormous passion and spirit. He wants to be successful both as a businessman in Portland and he wants to be successful with the team on the floor."

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Silver also gave some thoughts on the proposed $600 million funding package for updates to Moda Center, which has been passed by the Oregon state legislature and is currently being negotiated with the Portland city council and Multnomah County leaders, along with a proposed 20-year lease extension.

Since the sale was announced, some have speculated that it could lead to a new owner attempting to move the team to a different market.

Much of the wind has been taken out of the sails on any potential relocation talk by the headline news out of this week's meeting: the NBA has finally received the green light from the owners to move forward with exploring bids for expansion teams in Seattle and Las Vegas, to start playing as soon as the 2028-29 season.

Silver reiterated the need for the Moda Center updates to happen, but he spoke at length about Portland's importance to the NBA, a view he says Dundon shares. (Dundon himself has declined all interview requests until the sale closes next week.)

"I see no reason why [Dundon] won't be successful in Portland," Silver said. "I think he recognizes it's a unique opportunity. There are many different types of markets in the NBA, but when you have markets that are single-sport markets—I should say, we also have a WNBA team coming to Portland right now, and that makes what needs to happen with the building even more important. You're going to have two major-league basketball teams there, so they'll need a state-of-the-art arena to play in. The Moda Center needs an upgrade, and there's been a vote already to ensure that will happen. But I'm a big fan of the market."

Later, in response to a question about the potential expansion to Seattle, Silver brought up the benefits of having two teams in the Pacific Northwest instead of one.

"As Tom Dundon comes in and we get a revamped Portland Trail Blazers and an upgraded arena, I love the rivalry that they've had historically there with Seattle," he said. "This isn't a reason to expand, but it makes our schedulers' lives a lot easier if you have a team in Seattle as well as Portland."

After the press conference was over, Silver spoke for a few minutes with the two Portland-based reporters who came to New York for the meetings, myself and The Oregonian's Joe Freeman, and went into much more detail about Dundon's interest in keeping the team in Portland, the league's feelings on the proposed Moda Center renovation project and the future status of embattled head coach Chauncey Billups, whose trial date for the gambling-related allegations he's facing is set to begin on Nov. 2.