The ultimate worst thing you can do as an owner is take a fanbase’s team away from them and relocating the team to another city.

Even more than just being absolutely terrible at your job, if you can’t even do the bare minimum (keep the team in said city) then you truly are the lowest of lows as an owner.

Only way you can ever get away with something like that is if the fans don’t want the team in the city anymore. That’s it.

This is basically the feeling on MJ’s ownership of the Hornets as well. He was a cheapskate but he wasn’t an asshole.

I mean, the city (taxpayers) paid for the Golden1 Center, not Vivek. he deserves credit for keeping the team in Sac but that’s about it. He’s not a great owner overall

A’s and the Blazers are my favorite teams from when I was a kid. I’m in hell 😅

I don’t think that last paragraph is a conspiracy if it’s exactly what he is doing. As a St Louis native, this is right out of the Kroenke playbook we saw with the Rams. First steps towards relocation

The only think that makes me doubt that conspiracy is exactly “where would they go?” But it’s all very dispiriting stuff to hear after starting last season with Billups getting indicted the morning after our first game, and clawing back to actually being in the playoffs for the first time in forever.

I’ve been a lifelong Blazer fan, but whoo this is a rocky start to the new ownership. If he fucks it up bad enough, I’ll just spend my time and money elsewhere (at least we have a WNBA team again).

extract every bit of wealth they can out of it, and destroy what made those things special in the first place.

I think (north american) sports is going to end up being particularly susceptible to this going forward, as there’s more billionaires with money to throw around. Most of the income of a pro sports team is determined by the league overall, not the team - tv rights and the overall appeal of the NBA determine what he makes. Things like cutting quality or charging more for concessions etc… probably won’t massively impact revenue. Yeah, if they’re good it is worth more, but the floor is really, really high, no matter how much they suck; a team can’t lose their way to bankruptcy. Even the draft ensures that if his team sucks, he’ll get free incoming stars - no matter how poorly the team is run, there’ll be a steady stream of excitement to keep the cash flows coming.

North American pro sports is a socialist social club for rich people, its just been fashionable to win, so most of them aren’t cutting to the bone. As soon as it becomes ‘in’ amongst asshole billionaires to ‘optimize sporting based revenue flows’ we can expect most other teams to start feeling like a low cost airline.

This guy legit thinks he can run a sports team the same way billionaires buy up companies, extract every bit of wealth they can out of it, and destroy what made those things special in the first place.

I’m not an NHL guy, but I’ve seen references to him buying an NHL team, doing the same thing, and having success.

That’s a pretty common conspiracy that is brought up when owners make horrible anti-fan decisions. The obvious recent case would be the new Mavs owners and the Luka trade.

The conspiracy being that they want to build a mega casino in Dallas but the local government won’t let them. So in protest and as a way around the problem, they want fans to hate the team so much and lose so much interest that it gives them an excuse to relocate to a city where they can build a casino.

Of course, the simplest explanation is that Nico Harrison is just an idiot. The same guy who messed up Nike’s pitch to Steph so badly by forgetting to take out KD’s name out of the PowerPoint slide.

Not a conspiracy at all, the A’s, Chargers, Clippers, and Oilers owners started tanking the teams once they figured they couldn’t get a new stadium or arena. In the case of the chargers and clippers, they still didn’t get stadiums! (Chargers pay rent to the Rams, Clippers played in staples center for decades before Balmer bought them a new arena)

Where would they go? If OKC can support a team, anywhere can. Kronke is revitalizing the Sports Arena in San Diego, but from what I understand it’s too small to support an NBA franchise. Maybe Louisville to capitalize on Kentucky’s love of college basketball? Austin doesn’t have a team. Dallas is a dark horse, I sincerely believe that Adleson wants to get the mavericks to move to Las Vegas, so the Blazers could move to Dallas. Some really out there ideas would be Montreal, Vancouver, Nashville, Newark, Raleigh, Tampa Bay, or St. Louis

Is that even a conspiracy haven’t teams already done that .

Destroy the team .. make fans hate it … and then cry we get no support here we have to move

The problem he’s going to face is why would the other owners allow it? Relocation fees are typically. 5-6x an expansion fee. Portland has never had trouble sustaining the Blazers so why would they allow him to relocate when they could do an expansion to his target city and make another $10 billion off the expansion fee?

Him getting local government to bend over to him and throw hundreds of millions of tax payer dollars to fund the Moda Center updates could also be his way to getting petty revenge.

They ain’t pretty

Not local families but in Bundesliga (Germany, Football) there’s the 50+1 rule, to make sure each club is owned first and foremost by its own members.

There is no big corporate or fund that has the majority share in any team of the league and the league is top ³⁄₄ in the world. Bayern Munich is also top ³⁄₄ club in the world.

Fuck James Dolan but in high school I used to cashier for his dad at a supermarket on long Island

The Guards have been locally owned for a long time. That’s about to change so we’ll see how ugly it gets.

The Lakers have long gotten away with running a bare bones operation

Lakers might be cheap on player salary and be lazy in some areas, but to call it bare bones is silly. They even opened a whole new fancy 100 million dollar practice facility.

Easy, just move the Blazers to LA! LA could always use another team!

Amenities aren’t anywhere near standard. The Nuggets have one practice court.

I don’t follow hockey much, so I don’t how his penny pinching in the NHL was perceived by fans. Maybe Carolina fans were freaking about it too? Maybe they didn’t care?

Either way, from his perspective, he believes his approach in Carolina worked, so I get why he’d think to do the same with the Blazers. Never mind they’re two different leagues with different cap structures and different fan experiences/perceptions. And never mind the collateral damage that comes along with it.

Sterling Clippers North.

All of these threads about Dundon is just a ton of grandstanding. I get it, the initial cuts suck and don’t look good, but as a Canes fan, he absolutely turned the franchise around. Complete 180 from the crapfest it was before he took over.

Let stuff play out before throwing out wild determinations about his tenure. Maybe, just maybe, the Trailblazers were not well run. Maybe he’s actually trying to fix it.

Social media doesn’t like that, though. Gotta have hot takes and immediate, conclusive reactions.

I’m not saying Dundon is a great person, but the results in Raleigh speak for themselves. Perennial contenders and currently one win away from the SCF.

That’s the point I’m making. He does the same thing the Canes and they are winning. So why would he adjust his ways with the Blazers.

I think that’s his point

His manager is a die hard Homer who took less than market value to coach the team. You can’t replicate blind luck, especially by pushing bad karma out in the world like he is doing.

The plague of second half ceos. People hired after something has become large enough to then strip it down to a shell of itself for the appearance of profitability. Then once all the profit has been squeezed and only a decaying broken carcass remains, the ceo leaves with a massive bonus on to their next chop job.

Corporations and business forget that you can invest in the product to make it better and more marketable, but that takes money and effort.

Rockies ownership got rich running a slaughterhouse, so they’re probably all genuinely sociopaths

The Rockies weirdly have a great fan experience despite the losing. So the crowds keep showing up.

Sounds like every dentist turned restaurant owner.

Damn dude you should sell sports teams. This sounds like a very good investment Like for real im checking Amazon now to see how fast I can get a team.

That’s why I’ll never be able to wrap my head around people voting for Trump and all his billionaire buddies.

It feels like all of us non-rich people should be able to agree to a starting point of not giving more power to the billionaires fucking us all over.

What happened to Whataburger? Haven’t been to one in 10 years

We’ve seen this a ton in baseball where the cheap teams don’t have money or wins.

The Angels in particular had infinite runway to become the #1 socal baseball team. Fresh off a championship in a great market, they even outdrew the Dodgers for a bit.

New ownership used all of this winning and good will to penny pinch on the minor leagues, player facilities(including stuff like gym equipment and air conditioning), the front office, medical staff, and anywhere else they could find that wasn’t pure player payroll.

This obviously hurt winning as their player development suffered a ton, and when they lucked into two MVP level superstars they couldn’t keep either of them healthy, and now one of them is coming off of consecutive MVPs and championships with the Dodgers and is probably the biggest star in the history of the sport. They don’t have a proper TV deal anymore, attendance is down, and ownership is outright saying winning isn’t a priority. It’s a death spiral.

not right