The last thing local basketball fans want is another hurdle on the road to a Seattle Sonics expansion NBA franchise.
Unfortunately, that may have just showed up courtesy one of their old Pacific Division rivals.
NBA commish drops another hint about potential expansion talks
The Portland Trail Blazers are being put up for sale by the estate of Paul Allen, which also happens to own the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and co-owns the Seattle Sounders of the MLS.
That could slow down the process of NBA expansion talks, because the sale of another team has more or less already done that.
Paul Allen estate, which owns Seahawks, putting NBA’s Blazers up for sale
Last summer, it seemed like expansion was about to be on the docket after the NBA signed a massive new media rights deal. But the defending champion Boston Celtics were put up for sale, and league commissioner Adam Silver’s comments about expansion suddenly become more vague than before.
ESPN NBA insider Brian Windhorst connected those dots last fall when he talked to Seattle Sports’ Bump and Stacy about why Silver had seemingly “applied the brakes” about expansion.
“I believe a significant reason why the NBA did that was because this Boston Celtics sale, which is forthcoming – there’s a legacy franchise for sale that is most likely going to set the record for the highest sales price in league history,” Windhorst continued. “There’s going to be a number of reasons to go slower, but you may want to open up the bidding for an expansion team or expansion teams after the market is reset by a gigantic sale. So I think the Celtics coming to market may have had at least some effect on that decision.”
The Celtics’ sale is now in process, so that hurdle seems to be out of the way. And they are much more of a “legacy franchise,” as Windhorst put it, than the Blazers – though the Portland team does have a 55-year history in the league and won the NBA championship in 1977.
That being said, just before news of the Blazers going up for sale broke Tuesday, Silver was on SiriusXM NBA Radio and said he expects expansion to be discussed in July at the league’s next board meeting with team owners. But he also made it clear nothing is imminent.
“Expansion I think over time makes sense,” Silver said. “As to precise timing, I think we still need to work on that.”
So does that all add up to a Blazers sale halting NBA expansion talks yet again? That we can’t say for sure.
We know the league doesn’t want to repeat the mistake it made in Seattle by letting a team with history get uprooted from its home and moved somewhere else – you may remember the cruel twist of fate in 2013 when the NBA blocked a sale of the Sacramento Kings to Chris Hansen, who planned to move them to Seattle. So don’t count on relocation being on the table, at least in this case.
That leaves two options for what the Blazers being up for sale means for how quickly a potential new Sonics team could be in Seattle: nothing, or nothing good.
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