If the Trail Blazers Want a New Arena, They'll Get One

Two weeks ago, when I asked Adam Silver at his Board of Governors press conference in Las Vegas about the impending Trail Blazers sale and the team's future in Portland, all I was looking for was the commissioner of the NBA to say on the record that the league didn't want the team to move.

It had been two months since the Paul G. Allen Estate announced in mid-May that the Blazers were finally for sale, and the idea that the team is heading to Seattle imminently had taken hold in the public discourse without much evidence.

Silver did say that day that the NBA's "preference" is for the to Blazers remain in Portland. But he also opened what figures to be a long public negotiation over where, exactly, the team will play once their bridge lease with the city and Moda Center expires in 2030.

"One of the factors there is that the city of Portland likely needs a new arena," Silver said, "so that will be part of the challenge for any new ownership group coming in."

Much of Silver's July 15 press conference was focused on expansion, which had previously been thought to be imminent but now appears to be a little further away. The assumption league-wide (including by me) for several years had been that, as soon as the NBA's new media-rights deal was finalized, they'd finally give the green light to add new teams in Seattle and Las Vegas.

Silver poured a bit of cold water on that idea, saying the league hasn't ruled out adding teams in the future, but more studies are needed before they make a decision either way. Since then, it's been reported extensively that a faction of the NBA's owners, led (of course) by James Dolan, doesn't love the idea of splitting the league's revenue pie up 32 ways instead of 30.

So with a Seattle expansion team not on the horizon, and the commissioner saying publicly that the Blazers will need to replace the 30-year-old Moda Center, it's created a perfect storm of panic and paranoia—the ideal backdrop for a new effort to lobby the city and state for money for an arena.

On Wednesday morning, Willamette Week published a cover story titled "Portland Must Confront the Real Danger of Losing the Blazers," accompanied by a graphic of Damian Lillard, who rejoined the Blazers less than two weeks ago, in a green and yellow SuperSonics jersey and the words "ANYTHING BUT THIS." The story quotes Ron Wyden, Oregon's senior U.S. Senator, and other local political figures, as well as speculating, based on a throwaway line from The Athletic's John Hollinger last week, that the Blazers drafted Yang Hansen less for basketball reasons and more because of what having a Chinese player will do for the value of the franchise.

"We invite you to immerse yourself in this fear—to imagine people asking you if you remember when the Nashville Blazers played in Portland—and to experience it as a form of exposure therapy in which you’re shown the things you most dread until you become strong enough to confront them," they wrote.

The Willamette Week story coincided with the announcement of the launch of a new "advocacy group" called Rip City Forever, led by former Blazers center and failed 2010 Republican gubernatorial candidate Chris Dudley and Marshall Glickman, the son of original Blazers owner Harry Glickman.

"Portland – The upcoming sale of the Trail Blazers opens the door to the possibility of a new owner moving the team to another city," the Rip City Forever press release read. "To make sure that doesn’t happen, a group of former players, team officials and business leaders have organized themselves to advocate and work with local and state officials to ensure the Blazers remain and succeed in Portland for decades to come."

Their official petition calls for the city to either renovate Moda Center or, "more likely," build a new arena, either at Lloyd Center or somewhere downtown. The Rip City Forever website is also accepting public donations, which they say will fund "feasibility studies" for different arena sites in the Portland metro area.

In response to this new effort, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek and Portland Mayor Keith Wilson issued a joint open letter to Silver. They pushed back on the need for an entirely new arena, suggesting instead that major renovations to Moda Center would be enough. The letter read, in part:

That’s why we’re writing to let you know we heard you loud and clear earlier this summer when you said you wanted to keep the Blazers in Portland under new ownership and made it clear that our arena isn’t up to snuff.  The Blazers are in our DNA, and at the center of what makes this community so special.  We mean that literally.  The Moda Center sits near the middle of the city, within reach of every corner.  That’s by design, and we want to keep it that way.  We also want to be loud and clear that as the Governor of Oregon and Mayor of Portland, we fully support renovating the Moda Center to become a point of pride for the Blazers and for our city.  We are prepared to explore the public-private partnerships needed to make it happen.

As it currently stands, the Blazers are about to enter into the first year of a five-year bridge lease extension they agreed to with the city of Portland in February of 2024. As part of that agreement, they sold Moda Center back to the city for one dollar, and the city paid the team around $7 million for a portion of the land under the arena. These moves fully consolidated ownership of the Rose Quarter campus with the city, which already owned the 65-year-old Veterans Memorial Coliseum and the surrounding parking garages.

Putting the arena back in the possession of the city was designed to make it more politically viable to use public money to cover some of the costs of the major renovations the Blazers were planning in the coming years.

According to the agreement that was reached last February and approved by the Portland city council last summer, money from paid parking at Blazers games, as well as a six percent tax the city collects on tickets to games, will be used to cover up to 50 percent of the costs of the renovations, with the rest being paid for by Blazers ownership.

The agreement also includes a clause stating that if, in the future, the Blazers are no longer playing at Moda Center, the team would be required to pay back 100 percent of the city's contribution to the renovations to the arena.

The Blazers have said in the past that Moda Center, which underwent phase one of its renovation in the summer of 2023, needs two more summers' worth of major work to bring it fully up to modern standards. This summer's installation of a new, upgraded video scoreboard, which is expected to be ready for opening night of the 2025-26 NBA season, is separate from that work.

The goal has been to get all of this work done in time for the 2030 NCAA Women's Final Four, which Moda Center is slated to host. Even before the Blazers were officially put up for sale, the plan was for these renovations to not take place in the summer of 2026 so that the Fire, Portland's newly named WNBA expansion team, could play their inaugural season at Moda Center next year. For the two future summers where Moda Center is worked on, the plan has been for the Fire to temporarily relocate to the Coliseum.

The Blazers being for sale already meant that the planning around these renovations would be tabled until a new buyer officially came in. Now that the public campaigning for a new arena has begun, it throws a new wrinkle into that timeline.

It's a playbook that has been executed many times in the NBA, and other professional sports leagues, when the powers that be decide an existing arena is too old.

The last time a team was in serious danger of relocating was 2013, when a group led by Chris Hansen and Steve Ballmer was set to buy the Sacramento Kings and move them to Seattle. After an extended back-and-forth bidding war, the team was instead sold to a group led by Vivek Ranadivé after then-NBA commissioner David Stern brokered the deal in an effort to keep the Kings from moving. Ranadivé's group secured $255 million in public funding from the city of Sacramento towards the construction of the Golden 1 Center, which opened in 2016.

More recently, Washington Wizards and Capitals owner Ted Leonsis successfully used the threat of building a new arena in Virginia to leverage the District of Columbia into paying $515 million of the $850 million cost of a major renovation to Capital One Arena. And the Philadelphia 76ers' brand-new arena, set to open in 2031, was approved after the local government of Camden, N.J. offered $400 million in tax breaks to move there instead.

A new arena for the Blazers, or increased public funding for the Moda Center renovation, is going to be unpopular with a large portion of Portland residents, and rightfully so. Personally, I tend to come down on the side that publicly funded sports arenas are a scam and anybody who's rich enough to buy an NBA team can afford to pay for their own new building if they want one.

But that doesn't mean it won't happen. We just saw the Oregon legislature approve a bill to earmark $800 million in future "jock tax" revenue for a ballpark that may or not ever be built, for a Major League Baseball team that may or may not ever exist.

That funding structure probably won't work for the Blazers, because the funds for the baseball stadium would come from income taxes on future ballplayer salaries, rather than diverting money from taxes on NBA players that the city is already collecting and using for other, more pressing matters.

Still, if the state was willing to help out with a ballpark for the Portland Diamond Project—a group that doesn't even have a publicly named owner for the hypothetical baseball team and has mostly existed as a clothing brand since it launched in 2018—I have to think that if it really came down to it, they'd do what they had to do to get an arena built for the Blazers, a team with decades of history and generations of fans, that's inextricably linked to the identity of the city.

Remember, even though Seattle lost the Sonics because they didn't want to pay to replace the old Key Arena, that stance wasn't out of a principled opposition to paying for sports stadiums. They just had already built new buildings for the Seahawks and Mariners within the previous decade and simply thought paying for a third one was overkill. A new arena for the Blazers is a big ask, but not an unprecedented one.

I believe Silver that the NBA wants the Blazers to remain in Portland. Why wouldn't he? They're one of the league's model franchises for small-market success, consistently in the top 10 in attendance and, until the last four seasons, reliably competitive most years.

I also believe the people high up in the Blazers organization I've talked to who insist that Jody Allen and Bert Kolde care about the late Paul Allen's desire for the team to remain in Portland.

It will be impossible to guess how this all plays out until we know who's buying the team, and that process isn't expected to conclude until next spring or summer. Maybe a group with strong local ties and deep pockets will emerge victorious and agree to pay the entire $1 billion-plus for a new Blazers arena without asking for any public money, and all of this panic will seem silly.

More likely, the team will be bought by a group involving an out-of-town majority owner and a lot of private-equity money, and they'll leverage the widespread local paranoia about the Blazers moving, which has only been heightened with this week's Rip City Forever launch and accompanying coverage blitz, to squeeze the state for money for a new arena.

I've seen this movie enough times to know that the billionaires usually get what they want in these public negotiations.

If you want to know why I really believe, and have from the beginning, that the Blazers aren't going anywhere, that's it.