What Are the Trail Blazers' Plans for Newest Land Purchase?
The Blazers recently bought the building next to their practice facility in Tualatin for $4.6 million.
While the Trail Blazers’ roster is in a holding pattern until the draft and free agency later this month, the organization has quietly been investing off the court. Back in February, the team purchased a plot of land next to their practice facility in Tualatin for $4.6 million. The property currently encompasses a Mercedes-Benz service center and part of the adjacent parking lot. The rest of the lot is owned by the Bridgeport Church located next door.
The purchase was first reported by The Oregonian on June 4 and later confirmed by the team.
While the exact details and timing for their development of the land are still being worked out, the purchase does provide a window into what the organization has planned over the next decade, and what that could mean for the timeline of an eventual sale.
Plans for an updated practice facility
According to people with knowledge of the deal, the Blazers were already looking for ways to update and expand their practice facility, which was first built in 1998 and underwent its first major renovations 10 years ago. When the land next to their building went up for sale at the beginning of this year, ownership felt it was an opportunity they couldn’t pass up to eventually expand their footprint.
The Oregonian story from last week quotes Lauren Anderson, the director of the University of Oregon’s Warsaw Sports Business Center, speculating that the land could be used to build a practice facility for a WNBA expansion team. For a few reasons, it’s safe to say that isn’t part of the Blazers’ plans.
The efforts to bring a WNBA team to Portland are very much alive, and in fact sources close to the process still believe it’s more likely to happen than not. As we’ve written before, there are two groups—one led by the Bhathal family, owners of the Thorns, and the other led by the women’s sports-focused private equity fund Monarch Collective—with serious interest in making bids to bring women’s professional basketball back to Portland as early as 2026.
However, while the Blazers are supportive of the WNBA expansion effort and have worked behind the scenes in other ways to help make it happen, they aren’t directly involved with either of the groups from an ownership standpoint. It would make no sense for them to spend millions of dollars to buy land to build a practice facility for a team someone else will own.
The team’s eventual plan, sources say, is to turn the new property into an extension of their existing building. Over the past two years, the building has undergone some updates, with new office space being built and a revamped kitchen area that was highlighted in an episode of their documentary series The Trail this season.
In the past year, the Blazers’ building has become more crowded. Their practice facility now also serves as the headquarters of their new G League team, the Rip City Remix, which just finished up its first season. Not only do the Remix practice there now, but their staffers are based there.
Right now, the Remix’s coaching staff works out of makeshift office cubicles in the media workroom. That is obviously not ideal for anyone, but it’s the best available option in a building that was built for one team and is now being tasked with housing two. The new land purchase opens up possibilities for building a new extension to give everyone more space to have their own offices. They could even potentially build a second gym in the event the Trail Blazers and Remix want to hold their practices at the same time.
The Blazers’ practice facility’s amenities are currently in line with what other teams offer, but it can’t be described as truly “state-of-the-art” the way it could be when the building first opened in the late 1990s. For teams in non-glamour markets, things like practice-facility amenities and updates can go a long way to make themselves more appealing to players. However long it takes, and whatever the eventual updates look like, turning their facility back into a state-of-the-art building is one of the Blazers’ long-term goals, and this added land will make that possible.
What it means for the future sale of the Blazers
The elephant in the room when it comes to any Blazers business-side topic is, of course, the ownership situation.
On that front, there’s nothing new to report. By the terms of Paul Allen’s trust, the team and the rest of his assets have to be sold at some point with the proceeds going to charity, so a Blazers sale is inevitably going to happen eventually. But there is no publicly known timetable for that. Vulcan chair Jody Allen, who has been the team’s de facto owner since her brother’s death in 2018, has never been made available to reporters to answer questions about the timing of a sale, and all public statements from team officials have reiterated that the Blazers are not for sale and there are no imminent plans to put the team on the market.
There are two things to take away from the Tualatin land purchase as it relates to ownership, however.
One is that spending millions of dollars to buy this property, as well as more millions to eventually expand the practice facility, is not something an ownership group that’s disengaged or preparing to sell would do. There’s no timeline in place for the updates to the building, but that kind of work could take several years to complete once it does get underway. If Jody Allen and Vulcan vice chair Bert Kolde were planning to sell the team anytime soon, they’d likely put this project on the back burner and leave it for the new buyer to sort out.
Contrary to public perception, the Vulcans have continued to invest in the Blazers on both the business and basketball sides, including green-lighting the launch of the Remix and committing significant money to an ongoing multi-year renovation of the Moda Center and Rose Quarter.
This land purchase, and the plan to update the team’s practice facility, is another sign that the current ownership is still involved and invested enough to be actively planning these sorts of projects.
(As I’ve written many times, I’ve never met or had any kind of interaction with Jody Allen but have made it known to the powers that be that I would love to do an interview with her if she’s ever open to it. At the minimum, doing some sort of press conference and taking questions about the team’s ownership status would do a lot to dispel the notion that she’s an absentee owner, which everyone in the organization who works directly with her tells me is not the case. But you can’t make anyone who’s that rich do anything they don’t want to do. It is what it is.)
The other ownership-related takeaway is that whenever the Blazers do go up for sale—whether that’s in a few years after the NBA’s new TV deal and expansion are settled, or further down the road than that—having an updated practice facility can only add to the valuation of the franchise. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a small purchase: a few million dollars of land added to the assets of a team that will go for billions whenever it is sold. But it certainly doesn’t hurt to have.
The coming months and years will bring more clarity on what all of this will look like. Blazers leadership is still in the early stages of master planning. But those plans are underway now that the purchase of this land is complete, and it’s the latest indication that the current ownership group isn’t in the mode of liquidating assets to prepare for a sale. On the contrary, they’re continuing to invest behind the scenes to build it up for whenever that day comes.