El Cheapo lmaoooo 😂

This whole situation is just making me really bummed out. We have an awesome fanbase and it’s the only pro team our state has.

Really hope Silver steps in here at some point and makes El Cheapo do a good faith negotiation with the city.

all sports teams are so overvalued that there is only so many people who can buy a sports team and they are all POS

I’m very glad El Cheapo has stuck for Tom Dundon and I like very much that he knows it, he even commented on the name months ago

Scumbag,

These guys buy these teams and turn them into mules merely looking to profit and don’t give a damn about competition or paying for renovations or a new stadium.

Phil knight

Apparently they only had two offers [for the Portland Trail Blazers sale] … I just don’t think they had a lot of people that wanted to buy in.”

I lived in Portland for 7 years (2014-2021) went to dozens of Blazers games.

I just don’t think it’s considered a sexy city or Blazers a sexy franchise. Despite Phil Knight, and some local tech money in Washington, NorCal, Idaho (post-COVID). I don’t think Blazers really scream “sexy franchise/city/potential”.

The Moda Center is fine, but the Eastern Waterfront is awful (I will standby this). Unfortunately Portland fell into the trope of putting a ugly highway on beautiful waterfront, and unlike Seattle, Portland isn’t wealthy enough to fix the problem. So Moda Center sits on land that isn’t super valuable, in a neighborhood that’s mostly meh.

Portland isn’t growing that fast (in the 2010s it was, less so in the 20s), and just doesn’t have the potential of Seattle or Vancouver. The local leadership really sucks.

So it makes sense to me that a “broke billionaire” ended up with the team.

Portland is such a leftist city they should turn the team into a co-op with distributed ownership like the green Bay Packers

I don’t think it’s crazy that there needs to be a legally binding agreement that an owner can’t move the team for X amount of years after purchase.

Billionaires are a bunch of pansys, I woulda definitely bought that team if I had the money

Uhh lots of people would buy it. Very few at the valuation they ran it up to.

This is one of those side effects of the league becoming so profitable and the teams becoming worth so much, the number of people who can buy them goes down a lot. Then the league changes the rules to let investment groups and foreign money in, to drive the price up and also cut more people out. The league has always been owned by the wealthy, but most of them had a significant portion of their net worth in the team, then they sell to someone who its not as significant of a portion. This is a feature not a bug, you can’t just be the richest guy in your city and own a team you have to be one of the richest guys in the country

This reminds me of real estate, I grew up in Marin County and one of the biggest complaints I heard from people were that all their kids were moving across the country because they couldn’t afford to live there. And I’m like yea, you blocked any development for 35 years and intentionally drove your real estate values to as high as you could and now you’re surprised only old people with money and investors can afford homes. Like if you kept building and didn’t expect a two million dollar payout for being lucky enough to buy there in the 70s maybe you wouldn’t be 1000 miles from your family.

Same thing is happening with the NBA, all the league has cared about is driving up franchise valuations, eventually you aren’t gonna get to choose who you sell to. The league intentionally created the conditions for this to happen, people like Jerry Buss who cared about basketball couldn’t buy a team these days. It’s gotta be a shithead billionaire or a Saudi investment fund, but all those people got a fat payout too. It’s a double edged sword, and as mitch said, even a one sided sword has two sides.

Portland seemed like the “it” city of the 2010’s, then 2020 happened.

Should’ve asked me

With all the grief Jordan got while owning the Hornets there are two things us Hornets fans can be grateful for. He bought the Hornets name back to Charlotte and he signed a lease extension with the city until 2045 right before selling the team.

It begs the question, if they had not sold, what would have been the outcome? Could the estate have managed the team until a more suitable buyer has come along? Secondarily, what was the mandate for the sale of the team? Were they obligated to sell as soon as possible?

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These sports teams are becoming too expensive and also the current CBA makes it cost prohibitive to own a team.

This whole Portland thing has taught me a lot about the NBA…

As if the Sonics move wasn’t a lesson in and of itself omg.

The Blazers are the Jaylen Brown of NBA teams confirmed

Weird given that all of these teams basically print money.

There’s a Portland billionaire group.

Question for the Portlanders that understand the stadium situation.

Didn’t the city recently buy the Moda Center from Paul Allen’s estate? Why didn’t they try to sell the team and the arena as a package?

Has there ever been a state/municipally-owned team before? It seems to me that if these billionaire owners are going soak local government for hundreds of millions of dollars anyway, at some point considering public ownership’s got to be worth at least a conversation.

This situation really does give the nba what they want potentially you’d get Vegas, Seattle, & Nashville.

Phil Knight tried to buy the team in 2022

I would vet at least some of the owners approved the sale because they want to see if being that cheap will work. If it does, they’ll do the same.

I hope bill gets help for his alcohol problem

He answered his own question

Again, if billionaires want citizens to pay for the stadium, we should get a cut of the profits (or incentives like fixed ticket prices for all residents) or ownership %. But that shit isn’t going to fly with them.

That’s a big part of the problem with these crazy high team valuations right now, it really limits who can even afford to become an owner (and even these richest people right now are having to come in as a plurality owner since they need more money to complete the sale).

Just as worrisome, why did they let a guy like Ballmer buy a team…this guy has been consistently cheating since he got here, he’s done more damage to league credibility then Dundon has

People who have spent their whole lives with the mindset to accumulate as much profit as humanly possible continue to do things to accumulate as much profit as humanly possible

Maybe threatening a smaller market is strategically smart for a bunch of 80s and 90s movie villains? But, generally, it stinks to me.

Phil knight wanted to buy the team

Portland is a hostile city to billionaires, of course the guy wants out!

Because he offered the most money and the executor of the estate has a legal responsibility to accept the highest offer. This is all public information it’s literally not possible to be confused about if you actually want to know the answer.

Clippers sold for \(2 billion. Now we act like \)4 billion is pocket change.

Did Phil Knight not put in an offer?

they didn’t have a lot of offers because expansion was coming and the team doesn’t own its own arena

Cc cc v v. Vcc

I think it cannot be overstated how little Jody Allen cared about the team. She probably saw two offers and just took the higher one.

Adam silver don’t do crap this is a huge stain on him for letting this twat in. Sell the team to someone else or poison pill it like Memphis did

Talk shit about Dundon all you want. He won a Stanley Cup being the same way.