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📍CHICAGO — Since the death of longtime Trail Blazers owner Paul Allen in 2018, the sale of the franchise has been a matter of "when," not "if."
That "when" is now.
After seven years of the Blazers being run by his sister, Jody Allen, and longtime confidant Bert Kolde, the Paul G. Allen Estate announced on Tuesday that they will begin the formal sale process.
According to the announcement, Allen's estate has retained Allen & Company (no relation) as the investment bank and Hogan Lovells as the law firm to preside over the sale process, which is expected to continue into the 2025-26 season.
The estate also said in the statement that the sale of the Blazers will not affect the Seattle Seahawks or Allen's 25 percent stake in the Seattle Sounders, neither of which are currently for sale.
By the terms laid out in Paul Allen's will, all of his assets, including his sports teams, must eventually be sold with the proceeds going to his various charitable and philanthropic interests. In the years since he passed away, that has been happening gradually. Two of his superyachts have been sold—"Octopus" for $278 million in 2021 and "Tatoosh" for $90 million in 2022—and his fine art collection sold for $1.5 billion in 2022.
The status of the Blazers in that time has been a source of intrigue. In June of 2022, Nike founder Phil Knight and Los Angeles-based real estate developer Alan Smolinisky made a formal offer of just over $2 billion for the franchise, which was rejected. Jody Allen, in a rare public comment at the time, said that the team was not for sale and that it could take "10 to 20 years" to fully unwind her brother's estate.
But those sales pale in comparison to the Boston Celtics, who sold in March to private equity executive Bill Chisholm at a reported valuation of $7.3 billion. It was not only the highest sale price of any NBA team ever, it shattered the record for all North American sports teams set in 2023 with the Washington Commanders’ sale to Josh Harris for $6 billion.
The league is about to enter the first season of a new 11-year, $77 billion broadcast-rights deal with Disney/ESPN, NBC/Peacock and Amazon, one of several contributing factors to the increase in franchise values in the last few years.
In February, CNBC released its updated list of NBA team valuations, which valued the Blazers at $3.65 billion, the 22nd-most valuable team in the league. The lowest-valued team, the Memphis Grizzlies, is now worth $3.2 billion, according to the list.
News that the Blazers are finally up for sale comes at a crucial time for the franchise's relationship with the city, and for the future of their arena.
The Blazers are currently in the middle of a massive, multi-year renovation project for the Moda Center, which opened in 1995 and is currently the oldest NBA arena to have never undergone a major renovation. They've already completed one summer of work, and are planning on updating the video scoreboard this summer. There will be two more years' worth of work done on the arena, which will take place during future NBA offseasons.
The exact years for those phases of the renovation haven't been decided yet, although it will not take place in 2026, when Portland's still-unnamed WNBA expansion team will play its inaugural season there. During the two future summers when the Moda Center is undergoing renovations, the WNBA team will temporarily relocate to Veterans Memorial Coliseum.
The Blazers are aiming to complete the rest of the renovations on Moda Center before 2030, when the building is set to host the NCAA Women’s Final Four. The team is also working with Albina Vision Trust on a long-term plan to redevelop the Lower Albina neighborhood around the arena. Blazers president of business operations Dewayne Hankins has said publicly that he wants to bring an NBA All-Star Weekend to Portland for the first time in the franchise's history; that won't be feasible until these renovations are finished.
Last February, with their original 30-year ground lease set to expire this coming October, the Blazers and the city of Portland agreed to a five-year bridge extension for their lease at the Moda Center, which they are using to buy more time to negotiate a longer-term lease. The deal includes an option to extend for a second five-year period, but both the Blazers and the city intend to have a new permanent agreement before then. Now that the team is officially up for sale, it is likely that the new long-term lease won't be finalized until after a new ownership group is in place.
Under the bridge agreement, ownership of the arena was transferred back to the city from the Allen estate, and money the city makes from paid parking at Blazers games and a six percent tax on tickets will be used to cover up to 50 percent of the costs of the upcoming renovations, with the rest of it being paid for by the team.
Within the past year, in addition to committing significant money to the arena renovations, the Allen estate has made other ancillary investments. Last June, they paid $4.6 million for a parcel of land next to the Blazers' practice facility in Tualatin that is currently a Mercedes-Benz service center and adjacent parking lot. At the time of that purchase, sources with knowledge of the plans said the land would eventually be used to build an extension onto the Blazers' existing practice facility, although there is no set timeline for that project to begin.
There is a clause in the bridge lease agreement requiring that the Blazers pay back 100 percent of the city’s contribution to the renovations if the team ever stops playing at Moda Center. This was included in the agreement to protect the city against the possibility of a new owner moving the team, which is not believed to be a serious possibility, especially with expansion likely happening before the end of the decade and Seattle and Las Vegas widely thought to be in line for new teams.
The Blazers are one of the NBA's most successful small-market franchises, having made the playoffs 26 times in 37 years since Allen bought the team in 1988 and been in the top 10 in the league in attendance 17 times since 2001. The NBA has not had a team move since the SuperSonics left Seattle for Oklahoma City in 2008, a widely unpopular decision that is now viewed historically as a black eye for the league. Since then, the league has made efforts to block other small-market franchises from moving, including the Sacramento Kings in 2013.
The specifics of the bidding process for the Blazers are not known. Allen's estate is expecting a competitive group of bidders, and generally, the executor of an estate is allowed to use some discretion in choosing which prospective owner to sell to—although they must balance other factors with their fiduciary duty to the estate to maximize the value of the sale.
There isn't much clarity about the timeline for the sale, beyond the announcement on Tuesday that the process is expected to continue into next season. For what it's worth, it took about nine months between Wyc Grousbeck announcing last June that the Celtics were for sale and Chisholm emerging as the new buyer in March.
Considering how much is still up in the air with the Blazers' arena lease, and the role any new owner will play in those talks, it's unlikely the Allen estate or the NBA will want the process to drag out much longer than that.
