What the Seattle Supersonics relocation can teach us about the Trail Blazers

Nearly 20 years ago, Seattle lost its NBA team, the Supersonics. A combination of new ownership without local ties, an outdated arena and political decision-making saw the Sonics leave after 41 years in Seattle.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

With Portland City Council scheduled to vote on negotiations for the Moda Center Wednesday, Seattle Times reporter Tim Booth joins us to discuss what led the Supersonics to relocate from Seattle, and how that relates to the issues Portland currently faces with the Blazers.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Geoff Norcross: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Geoff Norcross. Nearly 20 years ago, Seattle lost its NBA team, the SuperSonics. A combination of new ownership without local ties, an outdated arena and political decision making caused the Sonics to leave after 41 years in Seattle. This is starting to sound familiar, isn’t it? We’re gonna talk now with Tim Booth, sports reporter with The Seattle Times, and he joins me now to share more about what happened in Seattle and what lessons it might have for Portland if the Blazers leave Rip City. Tim, welcome to the show.

Tim Booth: Hey, thank you for having me on this afternoon.

Norcross: So what was the first thing that went through your mind when you learned that the Sonics were leaving town?

Booth: A lot of thoughts, a lot of history, a lot of ties to my childhood. To so many people around here who grew up with the Sonics, seeing that departure was really tough for anyone who was a sports fan. Of any of the teams in Seattle, but specifically if you grew up as an NBA fan or a basketball fan, not having the green and gold as part of the fabric of the city was a really tough blow for many to accept. And it’s something that I think a lot of basketball fans in this area are still grappling with, and we’re talking about it 18 years after the team last played here.

Norcross: What were the main characters in the SuperSonics ultimately leaving town?

Booth: A lot of characters. You go back to the decision by Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks chairman, who owned the team at the time and decided to have his ownership group – which was comprised of 50 or 60 people at the time – vote to approve the sale to Clay Bennett, who was the businessman from Oklahoma who had worked with the NBA to be a temporary home for the New Orleans Pelicans after they had been displaced by Hurricane Katrina. That had gone so well that it kind of whet the appetite there for fans and for the owners to try and go out and find an asset that was available. It turned out that the Sonics were that asset. So, those are the two main players.

There were a lot of pieces that went along the way. You had issues with the state legislature here. You had the then NBA commissioner David Stern and his role in guiding this process that led the team to eventually end up in Oklahoma City. You had political leaders in the city of Seattle who dismissed the importance of the NBA and professional sports in the marketplace or in the community. So there were a lot of people [who] ended up very much responsible for the events that transpired that led the team to eventually leave.

Norcross: You called the Sonics an “available asset” at the time. What was it about the Sonics that made them available?

Booth: They had remodeled what was known as KeyArena back in the early ‘90s. It opened the same year that Moda Center did in Portland, 1995. There’s this sort of unique timeline of all three arenas in the Pacific Northwest – Rogers Arena in Vancouver, Moda Center in Portland and KeyArena in Seattle all opened the same year. But the remodel was done on the cheap, and it didn’t come with the amenities that, over time, became incredibly important for NBA teams to generate the revenues that they would like to see coming out of a venue or out of an arena.

Howard Schultz had gone to the state legislature. He’d gone to local leaders. We had just come out of an era when the public had contributed money toward the building of T-Mobile Park, the home of the Seattle Mariners, and Lumen Field, the home of the Seahawks, the Seattle Sounders and the Seattle Reign. The public just was not interested in giving any more money to update, remodel, enhance any professional sports buildings in the area. So Howard Schultz kept running into roadblocks along the way as he was trying to get some public contribution toward updating KeyArena to where it needed to be at that point.

It just got to a breaking point where he felt like the only way that the situation could be taken seriously would be to sell the team. By selling it to an outside entity that didn’t have Seattle ties, he felt like that would spur the community to then throw their support behind giving some money toward a new arena or an arena renovation. He couldn’t have judged it more poorly about how it was all gonna go. [That] ended up leading to the events that saw the team eventually leave.

Norcross: It’s interesting because the Moda Center, as you may know, the Portland City Council is having conversations about the upgrade of the Moda Center and how much public money is going to be involved. It sounds like you’re telling me that is a key thing, a critical thing in the decision to move any NBA franchise?

Booth: One hundred percent. Arena modernization, having what’s often called a first-class arena is a key element that the NBA wants to see its teams have and put out there. It’s for the impression that it gives, not only to the other owners and other teams around the league. It’s also for revenue generation because revenues get shared. It’s critically important for the bottom line of a billion-dollar industry, where these franchise valuations are now through the roof, that they are making money off of the building that they are using, and to the maximum amount that they can.

So yes, the arena is going to be … From watching it from afar, it looks very familiar to what we went through here. What happens with Moda Center seems like it’s going to be a critical breaking point, one way or the other, in how this all goes. If the city passes its funding package to go along with what the state and the county have already put forth, I think it’s gonna be hard for the current Blazers ownership to turn away from that. But if the council balks and the money isn’t there, then there’s going to be this continued sense of uncertainty about the future of the Blazers.

Norcross: Tim, we’re talking about NBA team relocation like it’s just something they can up and do. How hard is it to actually move a team?

Booth: It’s really hard and you have to have so many pieces in place. You have to have the city that you want to go to. You have to have a building that you would want to go play in. Or you’d have to be in a city where you’d have a temporary place to play, with the hopes of then constructing your own arena within that region. You have to have probably some willing political figures in those cities or a political climate that would probably be willing to see a team come into their area and maybe make some concessions on tax breaks or what have you, in order to see that new revenue stream come into their marketplace. Then you have to have the OK of the NBA. You can’t just say, “Hey, I wanna buy that team and move it to” name your city. The NBA has to sign off along the way in this process.

Norcross: How likely is the current iteration of the NBA, under Adam Silver, to do that and say, “OK, go ahead?”

Booth: It’s a great question because Silver’s at the behest of his owners. The owners essentially tell him what he should do. My understanding, from talking with him in the past and talking to others, [is that] he has a sense of trying to right the wrong of what has happened in Seattle. That’s why there’s been this push for expansion conversations and potentially bringing back the Sonics along with, potentially, a team in Las Vegas.

Because of that, he’s not interested in trying to see the same thing happen to Portland. He’s going to give a certain stance publicly. And he’s done that with some of the things that he’s said along the way, over the last year, about them needing to find solutions in Portland, with the potential of consequences if they don’t. But behind the scenes, the sense is he doesn’t want to see Portland go through the same thing Seattle went through. He’s one who feels bad about what happened with the Sonics. He doesn’t wanna see that happen with the Blazers. That’s the sense that you get from talking to others.

But at the end of the day, if 23 of his owners – because you have to have a 75% majority – say, “Yes, we’re OK with Tom Dundon moving this team to” name your city, Kansas City, Nashville, wherever, then that’s the decision that’s gonna be made. There would be massive relocation fees that would come with that. Who knows if the money would be there from the current ownership group to actually do that. But it ultimately comes down to what the current ownership structure of the NBA and the guys who own their teams feel about the direction of the league, and do they want to potentially allow this to happen.

Norcross: Last question, and I only have a few seconds, but what do you think is going to happen in Portland? Are we going to keep our team?

Booth: I think if the city passes the funding package and all the money is there for the Moda renovation, they’re gonna have a really hard time justifying possibly moving the team. So I’m hopeful that the Blazers are still there. And I’m hopeful that we see the Sonics back in a couple of years. And we’re talking about the Sonics and Blazers playing once again on the court.

Norcross: Oh, we’ve missed that rivalry. Tim, thank you so much for this. I appreciate it.

Booth: Thank you for having me on.

Norcross: Tim Booth is a reporter with The Seattle Times.

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