The Portland Trail Blazers are on a three-game winning streak, coming off one of their most dominant games of the season against the Philadelphia 76ers last night. The team seems well on their way to the 2026 NBA Play-In Tournament. Maybe, if healthy and a little bit lucky, they’ll get to the playoffs.
For all of that, a dark cloud is brewing over One Central Court. It centers around Moda Center, the arena in which the Trail Blazers have played since 1995. The structure is sound, but it’s expensive to maintain, is long overdue for renovation, and has been a bone of contention, passed back and forth between the Blazers and local government officials for the last half-decade.
The matter is coming to a head as Tom Dundon, Texas business executive, takes over majority ownership of the team from the family of late owner Paul Allen, who helped build the arena decades ago and has held the franchise since. Dundon’s representatives and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver have indicated that renovating the aging facility is a high-priority item, all but a quid pro quo for new ownership.
This week alone, Bill Oram of The Oregonian wrote a column [subscription required] saying he fears the Blazers will relocate because of this issue. Meanwhile the Blazers themselves have launched a page detailing preliminary visions for a new, better Moda Center. Finally, and most significantly, a bill has been put before the Oregon legislature proposing that state income taxes levied on anyone who works in or around the arena grounds be set aside in a fund to subsidize the cost of renovating the facility.
One look at these developments makes the results of the current season seem temporary, ephemeral even. Who can concentrate on the proceedings on the court when the Powers That Be are asking whether there will even be a court in the future. Like the residents of Judea in the Old Testament—watching their northern cousins carried away into exile by the Assyrians and saying, “There but for the grace of God go I,”—Portlanders are eyeing the empty NBA arena in Seattle and remembering this same situation playing out with the SuperSonics. Except the higher beings in question here aren’t divine, but politicians and billionaires. The lump in collective throats is understandable.
In light of these developments, let’s have some real talk about the issue, cutting through the atmospheric interference and getting down to the heart of the matter. We’re not going to resolve the problem, but maybe we can better understand what’s at stake and our role as interested observers.
Political scientists (or diplomacy game players) will remember Niccolo Machiavelli, 16th-Century political philosopher and diplomat. He’s famous for his work, “The Prince”, advising rulers how to negotiate difficult issues in a fractured environment.
Machiavelli’s conclusions are too extensive to get into here, but we can (over-) simplify his direct and implied lessons like this:
- Try not to get into a place where another person has leverage over you. It does not turn out well.
- If you have leverage over another person and you don’t use it, you’re a fool. If another person has leverage over you and you expect them not to use it, you are also a fool.
- Resolution to leverage imbalances doesn’t have to be drastic. If you give people enough of what they want (i.e. they appear to win or be satisfied) and the effort is easy enough, they won’t necessarily push the Doomsday button. But if you make them feel like they are losing—losing material, respect, power, or safety—you can anticipate they’ll value those things more than they value you.
Per Machiavelli, the first question we need to ask in the current environment is who has leverage here?
Tom Dundon and the NBA will hold leverage as long as they can find at least one other city who would be happy to host, and house, the Trail Blazers. If their demands aren’t met, they are free—by league rule and assent—to move the franchise, taking the team away from Oregon. At that point, the state will have no basketball, no income tax dollars from basketball, and no recourse to recover either. If Portland ever wanted a team again, they’d have to do what Seattle has done: build a new facility, come back with hat in hand, and wait.
The State of Oregon holds leverage over those tax dollars. Nobody can force them to spend money on an arena. Much will be made about the benefits of professional basketball in the area, but the reality is that nobody will perish if the team moves. Neither the team nor the public has direct remedy if they disagree with the legislative decision. It will simply happen.
So who really has leverage here? Almost everybody.
- If you narrow down to the immediate situation, the legislature holds the cards. They’re the ones with the money. They’re the ones voting on the bill. They hold temporary leverage over the team and the process.
- In the long-but-not-eternal picture, the team has more power. They have the ability to leave no matter what the government says. If they do so, the influx of state income tax dollars will dwindle. (On top of that, legislators can be replaced by popular vote. Billionaires and commissioners can’t. So the decisions of this legislature may be limited.)
- At the cosmic level, human beings are free to say that basketball either doesn’t matter much or doesn’t weigh as heavily as other societal and personal concerns. Seattle has mourned the loss of the Sonics, but few, if any, people moved out of the city when the team left, let alone rebelled against the government. Viewed through the ultimate, widest lens, the legislature wins…though the cost of the victory in hearts and public perception may be high.
Three things are evident.
First, the leverage advantage is dependent on perspective.
Second, to the extent that parties are opposed in these negotiations, they are going to scramble like heck to establish their own perspective, thus defining the terms of the argument and their leverage therein.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, you know who doesn’t hold the leverage? You and me. The general public—including the whole body of Blazers fans—will have to face this unfortunate reality. We are the backdrop against which this battle will play out, but we have relatively little immediate power over it. We do not appear anywhere in the above list.
What that means in practical terms is that we’re going to get every fear, argument, and clever negotiation tactic dumped right on our heads, but we’re not going to be able to resolve the situation no matter what we hear.
In the end, the losers in Machiavelli’s equation will not be Prince Dundon or the Grand Legislative Council. One way or another, they’ll end up getting what they want. Because of our love for the team and our need to exist in this region, we are the people they have leverage over. That makes the losers us.
In the short term, we’re going to get the business end of that leverage as we suffer through the public arguments and counter-arguments. In the long-term, the best we can hope for is to keep the team in town…with considerable cost. The alternative will be to become Seattle, Part 2. There is no solution which leaves us clean, in the same relatively-advantaged position we’re in now. That would mean one or both of these parties opting not to use their leverage. As Machiavelli said, that just doesn’t happen.
Here’s the stark reality. If you think this issue is going to be decided on your passion as a fan, your history with the team, your ideas of morality, your personal desires, or anything of the sort, you’re sadly mistaken. None of those things are going to matter. You might find good-hearted individuals in the midst of the fray who care about them, but they will not sway the proceedings. At best, they’ll become retroactive explanations justifying the eventual decision.
Until that decision is reached, our goal is to understand and survive what we’re going through, hoping for a favorable outcome at the end from forces largely beyond our control. That’s not a great place to be in, but here we are.
Free Market or Public Good?
Anticipating some of the terms of the argument at hand may help us parse them out when we encounter them. The debate is likely to take many twists and turns, but at the heart, it’ll probably come down to a simple question: are professional sports teams a free-market business or a public good?
Throughout American history, that question has been answered in different ways. Generally, professional sports are considered a business enterprise. Teams require investments, owners, corporate status…they mimic traditional businesses in most ways. They’re also afforded legal protections, subsidies, and specialized exemptions that only the most prominent corporations—if any—earn, largely in recognition of the unifying community identity (sometimes with a side order of economic benefit) they provide.
The debate often comes to a head when a new arena is considered.
Those who argue against subsidizing teams ask why the public should be giving money to people who are already rich, who already receive money from their operating business, and who should be bound by the rules of any other for-profit enterprise. They claim, somewhat rightly, that billionaires didn’t get wealthy by pouring money back into the system. They siphon it out. Why would a government entity claiming to represent the people bail water back into a boat that’s already over-filling? Aren’t hungry people, environmental protections, and medical research investments (for instance) more important than sprucing up an arena whose seats still work? We’re not talking about keeping the lights on. We’re talking about luxury boxes and concession stands to make the owner more money so he or she can keep up with the ultra-rich Joneses in other municipalities. That’s not the government’s job. The relatively-free business market should determine what can be spent or built.
On the other hand, the government subsidizes all kinds of projects and incentives that are perceived to have tangible public benefit. We named a few in the last paragraph. We can extend that to roadside history signs, public parks and preservation sites, museums and art facilities, and more. We’re not talking about whether to use public funds in this way, but how. If we’re making value judgments about how “good” a public good is, we could certainly make an argument that sports fandom spans generations and unites disparate people just as much as—or maybe more than—any other form of entertainment or art.
Note that nobody is completely wrong here and nobody is completely right. Where you land on the issue depends on two things: how much the words “public” and “good” apply to professional sports and what you think the role of government is in supporting public goods. There’s a reason this question has never been answered definitively. The area is hopelessly gray.
Though frustrating, this does have one side benefit for us who observe, on whom arguments are going to be shoveled. Anyone who frames this as a settled, black-and-white issue is automatically revealed as partisan. That’s not wrong, but it should be evident. They’re going to couch the debate in complex terms, wending their way through economic and democratic principles, taking stands on tradition and rights and etc. etc. It’d be simpler (and in some ways easier) to say, “I just want the Blazers to stay in town.” Or, “I don’t think this is worth investing in.”
It’s not that the other stuff is unimportant. Maybe it’s necessary to take those long, philosophical journeys. If we think they’re going to provide us a solution, though, we’re probably mistaken. As soon as we land on the answer, someone else is going to use their leverage to knock us off of that spot again, shifting the perspective and starting the journey over.
The Tactics of Persuasion
In the midst of all this, there are three tactics we probably need to watch out for.
The first is the one we just mentioned: the tactic of certainty. People are going to step up and say, “I have the solution! It’s clearly this!” No you don’t. No it’s not. This is a matter of perspective and opinion. We need to work it out together. Saying you’ve already done it cuts other people out of the process. It also assumes everyone’s opinion should be like yours. Personally, I hope the Blazers stay in town. That should be self-evident at this site. But I don’t begrudge a patron of the arts saying, “Why in the world would we use tax dollars to pay for this?”
The second tactic is similarly obvious: the tactic of lies. People will say anything when large sums of money and careers are at stake. Economic benefits and impact get overstated. Deficits are fudged on both sides. He said this and she said that in a private meeting. This thing is promised/projected to happen in the future even though it’s not written down anywhere and we have no evidence for it.
All kinds of arguments can be valid when we’re debating perspectives in an uncertain environment, but bad-faith arguments don’t clear our vision, they cloud it. If you don’t have any of those millions of dollars and careers at stake, there’s no reason to believe untruths at the table. They don’t help you win anything. They just stack the odds against a positive resolution where both sides are satisfied with what they walk away with.
The third tactic is the most insidious: the tactic of fear. Recall above where we said that leverage depends on lens. Parties in this debate will benefit or suffer depending on which lens the people around them employ. Convincing someone to pick up your particular lens—particularly when you don’t know them—is hard. Scaring people away from all the other lenses is comparatively easy.
Already, in the earliest stages of public discourse, we’re experiencing the language of fear. The one that’s going to hit us hardest is clear: you’re going to lose the Blazers. Look what it does (again, using our categories above):
- It skips you right over the immediate decision, whether near-future dollars from the state coffers should be spent on arena renovation. This is the place where the legislature has its strongest power. Instead we want to leap over that, jump right into, “Oh no! The Blazers!!!” and then reverse-engineer our way back into that legislative decision with our minds already made up by fear.
- It obscures the cosmic reality that, if the team left town, we’d all survive somehow. We’d be sad. It would hurt badly. But in the grand scope of history, this isn’t even a Top 1,000,000 tragedy of human existence.
Note how we’ve lost all power, all identity in this argument except the fear itself? That’s not a reasonable way to approach a discussion. That’s Machiavelli’s EXACT definition of leverage being exercised, coming through unfiltered, acted upon uncritically.
It also works the other way. “Hey, tax dollars are tax dollars. They’re not meant for private enterprises. The Blazers are nice but if we do this X amount of people are going to suffer terribly. Basketball just isn’t that crucial.” Priorities are important. Some people will be included and others left out no matter what we do with our public funds. I don’t think anyone would advocate letting people starve so we can watch an orange ball bounce. If that’s really going to happen, we need evidence of same. Otherwise it’s just different value judgments which we’re trying to circumvent by making broad, unflinching, and scary proclamations.
I’m no expert on these things, but at some level the following assertions are necessary.
- We’re not going to come up with a perfect solution.
- Somebody is going to win more and somebody is going to lose more no matter what we decide.
- We may end up diverting monies in ways we wouldn’t have chosen if we want to keep NBA basketball in Portland because in this place and time in history, professional leagues and their owners have leverage over the regions they operate in.
- We may end up losing the Blazers if that cost gets too high. If that happens, we’re all going to live with it. We do not expect anyone to pull back that threat—it IS the leverage for the franchise and the league—but our decision cannot be informed solely by that threat. When we hear it, we have to note the possibility, put it in a box, and weigh it among all the other considerations. The gravity of the franchise in our personal lives will help determine that weight, but other things exist too. For some people that consideration is light as a feather and that’s fine.
If we keep these things in mind, we have a chance, at least, of clearing the field of all the unfair tactics that will be employed in these negotiations, allowing us to weigh the real benefits and consequences.
Having walked through all of this, we can now ask the question in a slightly different way than we would have at the beginning. The issue isn’t whether the Blazers are going to stay, whether an arena will get renovated, or how much public funding is appropriate for same. No single person controls those answers, no two people agree on them completely. Even worse is the question, “Who will win this fight?” If THAT gets a definitive answer, the vast majority of us will lose.
Instead we can say, “We’re all going to lose something here. So how do we come up with a path forward where everybody gets something for that investment as well?” That should be of interest to all parties, even the NBA, who appears to have the least to lose in this situation.
If the eventual resolution can give Tom Dundon and the franchise enough to think they’ve benefited (and/or “won” by their own definition) while keeping the legislature to its stated goal of helping the public interest, we should be able to get through this without losing the team or our shirts. Ironically, that’s not the perspective of either side. It’s the perspective of the disempowered in this equation: the public awaiting the debate and decision.
Maybe that’s appropriate. Even Machiavelli himself would admit that the best solutions end up with all sides satisfied. He’d just assert that it’s difficult. We’ll see. Watch out for those swinging sticks of leverage in the interim and let’s pray it happens.
Looking to do something good in the midst of all this? Help us send kids and chaperones in need to see the Blazers play in person at the Moda Center March 10th! Here’s how! Time is running short and the request list is long, so help if you can!
