Comments

1
Remember when Howard Schultz said he sold the Sonics to someone who agreed not to move the team, and then everyone agreed it didn't make financial sense to move them from the 13th largest media market to the 43rd? Yeah, that was fun.
2
2B is fucking retarded. No way.
3
Ballmer is aware the NBA owners won't let him take it out of LA. He just wants to own an NBA team regardless of where it is.
4
Today's NBA is a shitty product. Any new arena built here will be huge and expensive. The days where you could root for The Glove from a good, affordable seat are gone. Color me indifferent.
5
I don't keep up on sports, so I'm in the dark about how the money is going to be handled. Is Mr. Sterling going to get a big chunk from the sale? Does the NBA seriously think banning him for the rest of his already very long life is going to depress him that much that he learns a lesson about bigotry?
6

We need to rehab the Tacoma Dome and get Paul Allen to bring the Trail Blazers up here for 50% of the season.

Also get China to build us an HSR to Portland so the trip only takes half and hour.
7
@2 Clearly you're unaware of how much NBA team values have skyrocketed. Chris Hansen's pursuit of the Kings increased team values immensely. The lowest valued team in the league just sold for $550 million (Milwaukee Bucks).

Also, the Clippers' current local TV deal expires soon, and everyone expects an insane bidding war between Time Warner and Fox Sports, because Fox recently lost the Lakers. Considering the Lakers' TV deal is something like $4 billion, the Clippers will fetch quite a bit as well. That is being factored into the price.
8
I checked All Of The Above (tm)
9
@1, Howie spent years trying to get new arena money and he sold to someone who promised to spend a few more years doing so. Even fooled the Save Our Sonics people into thinking Bennett was 100% working with them.

Different scenario, and probably one that the NBA learned from.
10
$2.5 Billion and Sterling gets most of that (bought in 1981 for $12.5 million). Oddly, Sterling's fine was a round 2.5 Million. odd coincidence, I know.

Chris Daniels ‏@ChrisDaniels5 1h
RT @robertnbcla: #BREAKING: #DonaldSterling lawyer tells @NBCNews #Clippers owner "...has received offers in excess of $2.5B" for the team.
11
@9: Wrong. Schultz spent very little time working with area governments in securing funding for a new arena. When he didn't get his way right away, he took his ball and went home.

I can't speak for the Save Our Sonics guys, but Clay Bennett's intentions were very clear to many other people in Seattle. And the fact that Bennett was David Stern's buddy, who helped the NBA out after Hurricane Katrina, makes me think that Stern was in on the OKC relocation plan from the get-go.
12
@11, Stern is fine with setting precedent that there's consequences if you don't build the NBA a new arena after they've been pleading with one for years.

http://seattletimes.com/html/nba/2003476…
Some Sonics' supporters who were initially suspicious of Bennett now believe he is serious — and is approaching the arena fight with more savvy than Schultz did.

"When we first started this we thought our role was going to be watchdogging and potentially adversarial with the organization," said Brian Robinson, director of the nonprofit group Save Our Sonics and Storm.
13
oops, missed a few lines of the quote,

But after observing the new owners' actions, Robinson said, "I have been convinced of their sincerity at almost every level."

Sports-industry consultant Marc Ganis said Bennett doesn't have a choice — NBA Commissioner David Stern won't willingly trade the large Seattle market for much-smaller Oklahoma City.

"From everything I have heard and picked up in the industry, this is a serious effort," said Ganis, president of Sportscorp Ltd., a Chicago-based consulting firm.
14
@11, I'm with you re: Bennett and Stern. I thought at the time and still think that Bennett always intended to move the team and that Stern was complicit, setting up Seattle as a warning to all other cities to pony up the funding when called upon.
15
Ballmer said in the WSJ that it would be "value destructive" to move the team from LA to Seattle.

It's value has everything to do with the market it, or any other team is in. Milwaukee Bucks just sold for about 1/4 the speculated price of the Clippers, as did the Sacramento Kings a year ago.
16
"How many professional basketball teams does California need?"

Let's see ... California has four NBA teams (Lakers, Clippers, Kings, and Warriors) while the Pacific Northwest has one (Trailblazers). The estimated 2013 population of California is 37,332,521 while the estimated population of Washington + Oregon is 10,901,471. That works out to a population ratio of 1:3.5 or 2:7.

Thus California should get three more teams and Seattle should get one.
17
It's not just population but the value of the regional sports networks.
Here is a long story that explains how the sucky Mariners could afford Cano.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/20…

The Clippers might sell for almost as much as the Dodgers did a couple years ago.
And why the cable bill is so high.
18
@7, it's the tv deal.

To that point, Chicago could support another team.

The next big question in the next NBA media contract will be the over the top delivery, streaming, wireless delivery.
19
The most interesting thing to me about this story is that Shelly Sterling leaks all of her stories though TMZ, and Ballmer did an interview with the WSJ.

The media and methods are odd.
20
@19, someone at the WSJ might be smart enough to suggest that by holding the team with a co-owned trust in a community property state, they have created a situation where they have to act against the trust's ownership jointly and also created a situation where if she were to pass away Donald could be back in.
21
It's pretty clear that Ballmer has given up on this city and its inability to make anything happen at anything but a glacial pace. He desperately wants to own an NBA team, so he's going to pursue this possibility.

The Clippers are not coming to Seattle, that much is certain.
22
Well, racist comments sure pay.

Please wait...

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