Why Adam Silver Won't Let Tom Dundon Move the Trail Blazers

I don't know for a fact that Tom Dundon wants to move the Trail Blazers out of Portland.

He hasn't said that on the record, like the late Aubrey McClendon did in 2007, a year before the Seattle SuperSonics moved to Oklahoma City. An anonymous Blazers executive told The Oregonian last month that they're not afraid to pay a relocation fee to go somewhere else, which could very well just be posturing. You have to allow for the possibility that this is all a negotiating ploy and moving the team isn't Dundon's end game.

But evidence that he wants to keep the team here is increasingly hard to come by.

At his introductory press conference in April, Dundon said he bought the Blazers because "they called me and said there was an NBA team for sale," not even putting on appearances of having any kind of connection or affection for the city that team plays in.

Two months later, onstage at a Portland Metro Chamber event, he defended not wanting to put any of his own money into Moda Center renovations, saying he was "making a pretty big investment by staying here and paying these tax rates."

In less than half a year in charge, Dundon has made the wrong kind of headlines on a weekly basis for every aspect of how he's managed the team, to the point that it's not uncommon to see fans and pundits wonder if he's intentionally sabotaging the fanbase's relationship with the Blazers so there will be less resistance to him moving them. In that time, he hasn't done or said a single thing publicly that makes you think there's any part of the city or its community that he likes, or even thinks about at all beyond how to squeeze more money out of it.

And the organization's approach to the ongoing lease negotiations with the city, which will decide whether the Blazers play in Portland long-term or not, can best be described as "begrudgingly participating."

The team's apparent fixation on a "first-class standard" clause in the existing bridge lease, and an offhand remark made during a June work session by city councilor Steve Novick suggesting the city could sue the team if they tried to move, gives some of the game away. Why would they care that much about preventing a lawsuit that could only happen if the team moved, unless they were thinking about doing just that?

Blazers president of business operations Dewayne Hankins bringing up the city's high income tax rates and "divisive political environment" during a council work session last week also gave away his new boss's true concern about doing a long-term lease extension with the city. Neither of those factors are new things that came up since Dundon first reached an agreement to buy the Blazers a year ago, or things the city council would have the ability to do anything about by December's deadline to agree to a lease. Who spends billions of dollars to buy a team without doing basic due diligence on the business climate they're walking into, unless they think they'll only be there temporarily?

This entire ordeal really is the perfect story for the times we live in.

The prospect of Portland using taxpayer money for arena upgrades to ensure the Blazers stay is making people who regularly use the term "sportsball" and people from the suburbs who buy into Fox News' long-running depiction of the city as a "war zone" argue on the same side that the team should move, while most of the rest of the community that wants them to stay can't help but allow themselves to be rage-baited daily through online public posturing from both sides.

Whenever the $573 million combined funding package passes and the 20-year lease agreement does get done—and I still firmly believe it will—nobody's going to be happy about it. The city will have been successfully extorted for millions of dollars and had their NBA franchise held hostage by an out-of-town billionaire. Dundon will be forced to stay here against his will instead of moving to a city with lower taxes. Blazers fans will get to keep their team, but it will still be owned by this guy.

Nobody's really to blame for why we've ended up here. Everyone did exactly what they were supposed to do the whole way through.

Jody Allen and Bert Kolde fulfilled their fiduciary duty as executors of Paul Allen's sprawling estate and maximized the value of this asset when they sold it, with the proceeds going to charity. By signing a short-term lease extension that only runs though 2030 and pawning the arena off on the city to make it their responsibility renovate, they increased the pool of potential buyers with the promise of leverage for a new building. They got the sale done with Dundon's group at a $4.25 billion valuation, slightly higher than the competing RAJ Sports bid and double what Phil Knight famously offered four years ago. Mission accomplished.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver achieved his goal with the sale, too, ensuring that franchise values continued to go up ahead of the currently ongoing expansion effort in Seattle and Las Vegas. Does it matter that the Rip City Rising group required nearly a dozen limited partners putting in money to get to that number, or that Dundon sold a 12.5 percent stake in the Carolina Hurricanes in the months ahead of the sale closing, or that the group only paid for 80.1 percent of the franchise up front? Not at all. The league got the valuation it wanted. How Dundon runs the team from there is up to him.

The NBA's other 29 owners also weren't going to stand in the way of the sale, or have much of an issue with the way he runs his shop. I'd even go as far as to say they love what he's doing to the franchise right now and are rooting for the Blazers to be successful under his ownership. If he can win in the NBA by operating the way he does in the NHL, they'll all have license to follow suit by slashing spending on everything with their own teams without having to take the PR blows that have already been absorbed by Dundon, who has made it very clear he's OK with being hated as long as he's making money and winning.

And Dundon himself hasn't done anything in his first four months owning the Blazers that he didn't also do in Carolina. Making beloved team broadcasters insulting contract offers designed to be turned down, lowballing the head coach, cutting costs everywhere on travel accommodations, employing a DOGE-like approach for business-side layoffs, focusing on buy-low gambles with his early roster moves—it's all right there in the blueprint. Hurricanes fans hated him, too, until he started winning. They captured the Stanley Cup in June and have made the playoffs eight straight years since Dundon took over, so who are any of us to tell him he should run anything differently with the basketball team he just bought?

Portland's 12-member city council, long thought to be too dysfunctional and ideologically divided to get their act together for this project, has done a lot in the last month to show they're ready to make it happen. The Blazers, meanwhile, stay hung up on things that shouldn't be obstacles if they actually have the same end goal as the city. Any benefit of the doubt Dundon had on that front when he first took over is gone now.

Despite all of this, I've never been particularly worried about the Blazers actually leaving Portland, and I'm still not.