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Adam Silver has lately been dealing with a lot of drama around the billionaires who pay his salary. On Tuesday afternoon, the NBA’s commissioner addressed one such case: The hardball tactics of Tom Dundon, the Texas subprime auto loan/pickleball tycoon who has placed the Portland Trail Blazers’ future in limbo.
In a press conference following a meeting of the league’s Board of Governors in New York City, Silver addressed the situation in Portland, which has continued to escalate in the six months since he last visited the Moda Center. At that time, things appeared to be wrapped up with a bow following the Oregon Legislature’s passage of Senate Bill 1501, which allocated $365 million in state money to renovate the Blazers’ arena.
Since then, pledged contributions from the city of Portland and Multnomah County have brought the total to about $600 million—yet discussions of lease terms are moving like a glacier as Dundon repeatedly hints that he finds Portland’s taxes too high and its economy too lethargic to make all that public subsidy sufficient. The city’s negotiators and team representatives have until the end of 2026 to finalize a term sheet which was voted through by Portland City Council last month.
“It is my hope and belief that the Portland Trail Blazers, or the Trail Blazers, can be successful in Portland, Oregon,” said Silver, catching himself mid-sentence. “It is important at the same time that Tom Dundon reaches a deal with the city officials and the state-elected officials that makes operating in Portland viable for the long-term.”
“I want to be very direct about it. I would see it as a failure if we did not keep the team in Portland.”
It has been a whirlwind summer for Silver, who finds himself fighting on multiple fronts as he attempts to turn his attention towards mediating a successful outcome for the league in Portland.
Last month, the Los Angeles Lakers—the league’s signature franchise—were flipped for $12.5 billion to a group led by Josh Kushner after having been acquired for $10 billion by Mark Walter just a year earlier. (This event being the latest in a long line that increased fan distrust towards the league’s owners and their increasingly purely profit-driven motivations with fans’ beloved civic touchstones.)
Silver’s crisis with the owners crested on Sept. 2, when he took the massive step of suspending Clippers owner Steve Ballmer for a year and docking the franchise five first-round draft picks for circumventing the league’s salary cap by arranging no-show endorsement deals for former forward Kawhi Leonard.
Silver is also now tasked with replacing outgoing WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert, who has grown deeply unpopular as the league has exploded in popularity. Silver referenced Portland’s nascent WNBA franchise, the Fire, who share Moda Center with the Blazers, in his remarks.
“At the same time, now I speak for our WNBA team in the market as well, we need a state-of-the-art arena,” he said. “I think by any objective measure now, the current building there is in the bottom measure of any arena in the league.
“I think everyone in the community acknowledges that not just for NBA and WNBA basketball, but for all the multi-uses of these modern arenas, concerts, conventions, graduations, you name it, the community needs the same thing.”
Only one NBA team has relocated to a new market in the past 20 years, with the Seattle SuperSonics leaving for Oklahoma City in 2008. (During that time, the Nets moved from New Jersey to Brooklyn but stayed in the same television market.)
But in 2013, when Silver was deputy commissioner to David Stern, the Sacramento Kings nearly moved to Seattle to replace the Sonics. Leveraged against the threat of any empty Seattle, Stern helped drive a deal which saw Sacramento’s city council give $255 million in public money in order to keep the team, ultimately leading to a new arena in downtown Sacramento and a massive adjacent real estate acquisition for the team’s ownership. (The road beside the arena was named for Stern.)
In Portland, Dundon is trying to run the same playbook that has been run by various ownership groups—in Milwaukee, Phoenix, etc—in the years since the Sonics left Seattle by using the latter as leverage to get public funding.
However, as of March—when the NBA set the stage for expansion to Seattle and Las Vegas—Dundon no longer has this same level of leverage. Silver likely recognizes this. Overall, he seems to just want things to go back to normal, and for the spotlight to stop shining on the billionaires who control NBA franchises.
“It’s my hope,” he concluded, “that we can lower the temperature honestly a bit in these negotiations.”
