{"id":805062,"date":"2026-08-06T22:34:08","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T22:34:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/805062\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T22:34:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T22:34:08","slug":"arenas-that-have-lost-nba-or-nhl-teams-turn-out-to-have-done-just-fine-field-of-schemes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/805062\/","title":{"rendered":"Arenas that have lost NBA or NHL teams turn out to have done just fine \u2013 Field of Schemes"},"content":{"rendered":"

For anyone who holds to the belief that sports fans are mindless boosters who want their elected officials to keep their beloved team owners (or just beloved team\u2019s owners) happy no matter what the cost, I present you with Blazer\u2019s Edge<\/a>, the SB Nation fan site for the\u00a0Portland Trail Blazers. Site editor Dave Deckard yesterday did something that the rest of the local media hasn\u2019t yet: He assigned a reader\/contributor who goes by the handle BlazerTag (possibly Ryan Whitledge, who used to host a podcast<\/a> by that name) to investigate whether the Blazers leaving town would really result in an economic and fiscal catastrophe for Portland, with the city left with \u201ca skeleton building, unused and rotting.\u201d And the answer is: If the experience of other cities is to be believed, Portland would be just fine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The former NHL home of the Arizona Coyotes has been without its anchor tenant since 2022; they\u2019ve moved onto the greener pastures of Salt Lake City. To see how bad the finances got in the immediate aftermath, let\u2019s hear from Glendale City Manager Kevin Phelps.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe venue (Desert Diamond Arena) smashed its all-time record for revenue after the (Coyotes\u2019) departure,\u201d Phelps said. \u201cThe next year, they beat that number by almost $10 million.\u201d<\/p>\n

Glendale, you may recall, had an especially horrific lease with the\u00a0Coyotes, under which the city had to pay the team to play there<\/a>. Portland, meanwhile, has an especially horrific lease with the Blazers, under which team owner Tom Dundon doesn\u2019t pay any rent or share any arena revenues.<\/p>\n

At the peak of their popularity, the Warriors left Oracle Arena in Oakland for a new facility in San Francisco: the Chase Center. So what happened to Oracle (now called Oakland Arena) when the Warriors left? It had its best fiscal year ever and reduced its operating deficit by 97% between 2019 to 2023.<\/p>\n

The Bay Area doesn\u2019t have a ton of arenas \u2014 it\u2019s basically the Warriors\u2019 new arena in San Francisco and their old one in Oakland (not counting San Jose, the South Bay is really a different market [EDIT: or maybe one market but a really sprawly one or 1.5 markets or something, see comments if this is important to you]) \u2014 so getting the Warriors out of the way has been a blessing in disguise<\/a> for the Oakland arena. Nobody ever talks much about San Francisco as an NHL expansion or relocation market despite its huge population, and this is likely one of the reasons. (The last attempt going extremely poorly<\/a> would be another.)<\/p>\n

KeyArena turned a bigger profit than it ever did with the Sonics. It happened the same way it did in Glendale and Oakland when their anchor tenants left: by freeing up the stadium revenue the sports teams were hoarding for themselves.<\/p>\n

It goes on like that, but you get the idea. This is, in fact, a common theme in arena finances: Having an anchor tenant for 40 nights a year is nice, but not so nice when they\u2019re not paying rent and are taking away dates that could be used on concerts that would. It\u2019s still not especially likely that Dundon moves the Blazers<\/a>, but it does seem that he needs Portland more than Portland needs him.<\/p>\n

BlazerTag then summed up with a couple of paragraphs that reflect a position I\u2019ve heard over the years from lots of sports fans who are all too aware they\u2019re also taxpayers:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m aware of the sorrow that awaits if no Moda deal is struck. I understand the emotional stakes, but I won\u2019t let them blind me to the cold, hard financial truth.<\/p>\n

\u201cModa Center will crumble without the Blazers\u201d is Stockholm syndrome reasoning from a fanbase being held hostage by ownership. It\u2019s misinformation that I will not suffer.<\/p>\n

Blazer\u2019s Edge also did some tea-leaf reading recently of the recently revealed internal Blazers emails<\/a> in which team lawyer Zandria Conyers suggested just not answering city questions publicly, because \u201cI don\u2019t think our public answers will be well-received.\u201d Deckard noted that while the pissiness was not great, \u201cit was not the kind of nonchalant dismissal one would expect if the organization had already checked out of the process,\u201d which is very true. \u201cThe good news: the Blazers do appear to be seeking public funding for the arena for real, which means moving doesn\u2019t seem to be their first option,\u201d concluded Deckard, and while that\u2019s probably stretching the meaning of \u201cgood news,\u201d it does argue against the conspiracy theory that Dundon bought the team just to move it, which is better than nothing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For anyone who holds to the belief that sports fans are mindless boosters who want their elected officials…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":805063,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-805062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=805062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805062\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/805063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=805062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=805062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=805062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}