His family won that Trophy don’t you know? /s

What a fucking joke.

The Panthers owner put his kids names on the Cup too.

However, the Panthers owner’s kids are adults who have “nepo baby” “advisor” roles with the Panthers front office.

Meanwhile, Dundon’s kids are like… actually kids (like around 6 years old) who obviously have no “official role” with the team.

The Panthers owner’s kids being on the Cup is fine, I guess (a nepo baby front office job is technically still a front office job). But Dundon has no excuse.

Interestingly, the franchise’s previous owner also just won a championship. Subsequently, they were sold.

You can do that? I don’t know hockey outside of Shoresy. Or did he just do it even though it’s explicitly against the rules?

Like, if I were a billionaire and my team won the Cup, could I engrave a portrait of Beavis on there and it has to remain on there forever?

🤣🤣🤣You’d have two nickels which isn’t a lot but it’s kinda wild it’s happened twice

Yeah, not dying probably would have helped.

Sadly it seems like they want worse owners who not only make the existing asshats look better but bring in a fuckton of money with them.

So each time we get a new ownership group it opens the door for an even bigger asshole to move in. The bar for just keeps getting lower and lower, but at least their profits are going up!

… wait, where have I heard this before?

Billionaires are parasites in general, not just when it comes to sports.

San Diego didn’t fail, Donald Sterling was just a malignant, repugnant, fetid piece of waste that the league should have got rid of when they had the chance the first time. Also, if Dundon thinks he’s having a hard time with Portland, it would be fuckin hilarious seein him try this shit on with SD.

All that said, I don’t see the league wanting 5 teams in Cali, and St. Lou is a smaller market so it makes no sense. He’s just trying to use whatever leverage he thinks he has right now before expansion is formally announced.

Social media really starting to blow helped the kings stay in sac immensely. I have a feeling the sonics and grizzlies moves would receive tons of backlash nowadays the way they went down

The Venture Capitalists way

They aren’t debating the actual fees. They are saying the owners wouldn’t hesitate to fuck over Portland even if it was only a relatively tiny amount of money.

No way - $29 mil won’t cut it as a fee.

I think they meant \(29M x 30 teams, which is \)870M. Seems about right for now. Would probably more in 2030, though. Also, Dundon & Co. still have a 20% balance on the purchase of the team. He doesn’t have $900M. Hopefully nobody gives him a loan. I can’t imagine a city he’s interested in would.

I think the point is that even if it weren’t for that much, if they could still stand to make a quick buck letting the team move elsewhere they’d do it.

Is that too close to Charlotte? I know NBA franchises have “territorial rights” within a certain range surrounding their market. Is Raleigh too close to Charlotte to be allowed?

Probably too close to Charlotte. Only about 150 miles from the Lenovo Center in Raleigh to the Spectrum in Charlotte. Couldn’t support two teams if they split the market. Especially if that leaves the entire PNW without a team for years. NBA could be shooting itself in the foot abandoning an entire region of the country.

They can do both - and both work towards the same goal.

I don’t think they have a veto necessarily but I think it was Zach Lowe that said teams have something in their agreement about adding/relocations into their area. Like the Spurs “sphere of influence” contains Austin and they have a way to either stop something like that or mucking it up to where it isn’t worth the headache. It was just an example but that is why they all have to agree on a location for adding teams well ahead of time.

It came up on a recent pod about this asshole and what he is doing to the Blazers. He was like “Where else could you go for a bigger market? All these other cities are much smaller or too close to a long existing franchise”

*This was always the issue with the proposed Vegas team. That is a Lakers town through and through. Sure the Golden Knights have been successful but that is a different sport/situation entirely. It wasn’t like they were flooded with LA Kings fans that needed to convert over.

St. Louis will not support a team stolen from its loyal fans by an evil owner after what Kroenke did to us

Vancouver is a bigger market than all of those cities you named

I think San Diego would absolutely rally behind an NBA franchise. Most local San Diegans hate LA sports teams with a passion, it’s not really a Lakers/Clippers town at all. But nevertheless, Walter/Balmer would never let it happen

I don’t think so. The travel demands, currency exchange (it’d be even worse with Pesos than CAD), and language barrier would mean that players would avoid being on a Mexico City team’s roster even more severely than they avoided Vancouver back in the day.

Any owner dumb enough to try it would be setting themselves up for the biggest NBA team failure since George Shinn.

KC would supplant Cleveland as the smallest market with teams in each of the NFL, MLB, and NBA. But unlike Cleveland, KC doesn’t have another 1M+ people in the CSA than in their MSA.

Markets like Indianapolis and Columbus are bigger and growing faster than KC. Indy does already have a team, but saying that KC is “primed for an NBA team” is kind of like saying that Indy is “primed for an MLB team”.

Maybe you can squint hard enough at a spreadsheet to convince yourself that it’s a good idea. But there’s just not a ton of corporate sponsorship money nor fan attention to go around. Especially after accounting for existing places where spillover money/attention ends up, like KC’s MLS team and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, respectively.

Even if a serious bid were made, existing teams in other leagues would have little incentive not to find ways to leverage their positions to manipulate it.

I lived in Kansas City for a few years in the 2010’s and I go back occasionally to visit friends.

I think the Chiefs being the brand that they are sort of inflates the actual size of the market in the minds of others. It really isn’t a big city or a big metro at all, especially compared to most markets with sports teams. Also, Kansas City is a college basketball town with KU being less than an hour away in Lawrence. The KU basketball fandom in the KC metro is huge and I don’t think an NBA team could compete with it. There’s also very little interest in the NBA from the local population from what I experienced. I almost never heard people talk about it, they just don’t seem to care about the NBA the way they do about college basketball. I actually met more people that were interested in the NHL, but I think that’s because the Blues are close by.

Don’t get me wrong, Kansas City is a good city and has a lot going for it. I’m not dogging it at all. But I really don’t see how it would be a better market than Portland, or even other cities that don’t have a team.

The funny thing about the KC arena is that they do better without the NBA team. Because they have no calendar holds, they can book every music act. I don’t think KC would want to give up all those bookings, even for an NBA team. It really is an amazing story that they built the venue in hopes of landing a team but ended up doing better precisely because they don’t have an NBA team.

It’s the same amount of money. Dundon is arguing that the renovations need to be determined and are currently not specified enough.

People talk about him making his fortune on subprime auto loans but fail to mention the fact he currently is a private equity scumbag. So no surprise that he’s running it like a PE takeover, that’s his line of work.

The Bears are seriously considering Hammond, Indiana. Obviously the NBA isn’t popular enough to go to a city of the same size, but there are mid level cities that would pay for the arena and still be able to supplement the box seat revenue with regular fans.

Sports revenue is no longer dependent on local fans supporting the team. Boxes and suites are quickly becoming the main moneymaker, which is why Vegas continues to be an attractive destination.

I haven’t seen that, what’s your source?

(The one I posted has been confirmed as legit)

And the lesson from that is hold the team to the lease. Seattle settled because we were told we’d never get a team back if we fought them. Yet here we are 18 years later still waiting on a new team.

Sonics had an existing lease agreement, ownership just decided they’d break it and leave. City negotiated a shitty settlement.

From what I understand, if they break the terms and move the team they have to pay back an insane amount of money from the entire lease period and cover the whole thing. It would seem to be prohibitively expensive if the idea is to save money as a cheapskate owner.

Also, I don’t believe the team has the rights to terminate the lease. Only the city has the rights to terminate it. If he defaults on, he would open himself up to a large legal battle.

It wasn’t just an affair, the guy allegedly kidnapped and raped a woman. Not a great look for someone who claimed to be such a devout Christian. 

When one looks at the other actions of the current Trailblazers ownership it is not a struggle to believe they are being greedy rather than negotiating in good faith like adults.

You can’t move a franchise outside of the area you’re approved for.

The point everyone is making is the league shouldn’t approve them moving outside of the Portland area.