SEATTLE — There was a thought that the annual “Rain City Showcase” would be the tipoff for a Seattle NBA expansion process, but the off-court game hasn’t begun in earnest yet.
The Los Angeles Clippers and Portland Trailblazers will play Friday night at Climate Pledge Arena. It is the third year in a row that the Clippers will play a game here. Both franchises have Seattle-area-based owners.
Plans had been underway, with multiple business and civic groups, to use the event as a launching pad for a coordinated public relations campaign about bringing the Sonics back.
But NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s remarks, to KOMO News in September, put those plans on pause.
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“We’ll never get ahead of the NBA. That’s always been our line, because we don’t want to. We’re going to prepare this building to be NBA-ready. We have all of the pieces in place,” said Climate Pledge Arena Vice President Rosie Selle.
“We’ve been proven to do basketball. We’ve just completed our 3rd Storm season where we’ve had to go from storm basketball, to hockey, to a concert to anything else under the sun. We’ve done college basketball,” she said, noting the “Future NBA Locker Room” is in place down in the bowels of the Arena, which is the same size as the existing Seattle Kraken locker room.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver responded to a question from KOMO News after the owner’s meetings in New York on September 10th. He said then “there was not a lot of discussion in this meeting about expansion, but only largely because, not for lack of interest, it was that we had said to them that we’re not quite ready.” He continued, “It was something that we told our board we plan to address this season. We’re not quite ready yet, but I think that there’s certainly interest in the process.”
He had previously indicated that an expansion committee would first address the idea and Seattle and Las Vegas are top targets. He also noted, in September, the league will pay attention to how the Seattle exhibition game is executed.
The news comes after Silver had also said the league would talk about expansion after locking up their new TV and Digital rights deal. It did just that this summer, agreeing to a 76-billion-dollar package with Seattle-based Amazon, ESPN and NBC.
But another complication came right after the NBA Finals with the announcement that the championship Boston Celtics were for sale.
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Kevin Calabro, the longtime voice of the Sonics, who is now calling games for the Portland Trailblazers said on KOMO’s “Inside the Arena” that he believes it to be a hang-up for expansion.
“I think they want to see where those numbers rest when it comes to Boston, and then get cost certainty on just how much they’re going to share and what kind of formula they’re going to use, and method they’re going to use to possibly share television revenue in the first couple of years of that expansion,” said Calabro.
Brian Robinson, a longtime fan, has been involved with many civic attempts to either Save or Bring Back the Sonics. He’s now started a volunteer organization called “Seattle NBA Fans” that is seeking to drum up support for the seemingly inevitable marketing campaign around the expansion process.
The Museum of History and Industry is also protecting all the Sonics banners and jerseys for a return.
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Robinson acknowledged he thought the game would serve as a “tipoff point” for the effort, and added “there is nothing indicating the start of this process will impact the finish of this process. So, we can be a little disappointed, but I don’t think that impacts the final outcome.”
There appears to also be an appetite for the end of the story. A recent Seattle Metro Chamber poll of registered voters shows 56% would like the city to work on bringing back the Sonics and improving Seattle Center. Only 26% of those surveyed felt otherwise.
Selle says the Arena should be packed on Friday, and will be ready to highlight once again that it can host a team full-time. She says schedules have been checked, and the in-house programming team can handle hockey to basketball conversions in a few hours. Selle says there are enough gaps in the schedule in the coming years. She says CPA is holding close to 300 events a year, between smaller corporate meetings, the Storm, Kraken, concerts, and special events.
“We’re up to NBA standards, modern NBA standards. We’re just waiting and preparing so that when that day comes, we can hit go,” she says.