A group led by Carolina Hurricanes owner Don Dundon has reached a tentative agreement with Paul Allen’s estate to buy the Trail Blazers and keep the team in Portland.<\/p>\n
Dundon confirmed the agreement in a text exchange with The Associated Press on Wednesday. His group includes Portland-based Sheel Tyle, the co-founder of investment firm Collective Global, and Marc Zahr, co-president of Blue Owl Capital.<\/p>\n
The NBA board of governors must ratify any final purchase agreement. ESPN reported Wednesday the deal was for $4 billion US. Dundon did not reveal the terms of the sale to the AP.<\/p>\n
CNBC earlier this year valued the Trail Blazers at $3.65 billion. In March, the Boston Celtics sold for $6.1 billion.<\/p>\n
Dundon, 53, bought a stake in the Hurricanes in 2017 and became the majority owner in 2018. He is chairman and managing partner of the Dallas-based firm Dundon Capital Partners.<\/p>\n
Allen’s estate announced in May it had begun the process of selling the Trail Blazers. The billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, who died in 2018 at age 65 from complications of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, originally bought the Blazers in 1988 for $70 million.<\/p>\n
Allen also owned the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and was a co-owner of Major League Soccer’s Seattle Sounders.<\/p>\n
Since his death, Allen’s sister, Jody Allen, has served as chair of both teams and is a trustee of the Paul G. Allen Trust. Paul Allen stipulated in his will the eventual sale of his teams, with the proceeds given to philanthropic endeavours.<\/p>\n
The estate has not announced plans for the sale of the Seahawks or the 25 per cent stake in the Sounders.<\/p>\n
Jody Allen reportedly rebuffed an offer to buy the Trail Blazers from Nike co-founder Phil Knight for more than $2 billion in 2022. At that time, there were no ongoing discussions about the sale of the teams, she said in a rare statement.<\/p>\n
The Trail Blazers joined the NBA as an expansion team in 1970 and won their lone NBA championship in 1977.<\/p>\n
Last season, the Blazers finished 36-46 and missed out on the playoffs for the fourth straight year.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the Carolina Hurricanes said Dundon was “excited about the opportunity” to buy the Trail Blazers, and added that the move will not affect the NHL team.<\/p>\n
The Hurricanes, based in Raleigh, N.C., have made the playoffs in each of the last seven seasons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A group led by Carolina Hurricanes owner Don Dundon has reached a tentative agreement with Paul Allen’s estate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":68553,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-68552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}