Seattle SuperSonics Thread

[Deleted member 38182]

How high will either side go?

 

Well thats the thing, if Sac matches can Hansen just raise his bid again? 

I guess we just have to sit back and wait it out 

FWIW Bruski is still adamant that this won't fly with the NBA, so we will see 

 

[dakid23]

RT @ChrisDaniels5: BREAKING: Hansen group will acquire 7% that is tied up in bankruptcy court, as Sacramento fails to match. #NBAKings

That's a start!!!

 

[Deleted member 38182]

RT @ChrisDaniels5: BREAKING: Hansen group will acquire 7% that is tied up in bankruptcy court, as Sacramento fails to match. #NBAKings

That's a start!!!

Daniels worded that terribly 

Sac 'failed' to match it because the 7% still needs to be vetted by NBA. And if Sacramento did match it and Seattle completes the heist, there is no way the NBA would approve Sacramento to own that 7% while Hansen owns majority and vice versa 

 

[Sinner]

http://www.nba.com/2013/news/04/13/kings-valuation-offer/index.html?ls=iref:nbahpts

$550mn... 

 

[Deleted member 38182]

http://www.nba.com/2013/news/04/13/kings-valuation-offer/index.html?ls=iref:nbahpts

$550mn... 

about a $16m increase in the 65% for Maloofs majority share. 

Why is Hansen increasing the bid tho. Thought he'd be confidant with what he's got going, guess not.

 

[noblekane]

best case scenario for everyone...

Sacramento keeps the Kings since its their team and heritage & Seattle gets an expansion team in a couple years, since they lost their team a few years ago

Both teams get a new start for a new era

fixed for you

 

[Sinner]

http://www.nba.com/2013/news/04/13/kings-valuation-offer/index.html?ls=iref:nbahpts

$550mn... 

about a $16m increase in the 65% for Maloofs majority share. 

Why is Hansen increasing the bid tho. Thought he'd be confidant with what he's got going, guess not.

Only just getting caught up on everything... wow.

Afraid that Sac group will match his bid and that the Maloofs will accept?

 

[Deleted member 38182]

http://www.nba.com/2013/news/04/13/kings-valuation-offer/index.html?ls=iref:nbahpts

$550mn... 

about a $16m increase in the 65% for Maloofs majority share. 

Why is Hansen increasing the bid tho. Thought he'd be confidant with what he's got going, guess not.

Only just getting caught up on everything... wow.

Afraid that Sac group will match his bid and that the Maloofs will accept?

Speaking as objectively as I possibly can, I would be SHOCKED if Sac doesn't at least match.... (it would be a death blow if they don't)

Biased me says: I think when Sac does match, it will be at the last possible moment so Hansen/Ballmer can't up their bid again

 

[dmbrhs]

There's no way the NBA doesn't love this. It's jacking up the price for every franchise by the day lol. I'm more and more convince Ballmer hopped on board with this venture just for these situations. Nobody can outbid him.

 

[Deleted member 38182]

There's no way the NBA doesn't love this. It's jacking up the price for every franchise by the day lol. I'm more and more convince Ballmer hopped on board with this venture just for these situations. Nobody can outbid him.

This.

Ballmer definitely seems driven/crazy enough to start selling off his assets to have his way.

 

[dmbrhs]

This.

Ballmer definitely seems driven/crazy enough to start selling off his assets to have his way.

That's why people keep pointing to him selling off $1.2 billion worth of stock recently. There were rumblings that is was all in prep for him buying an NBA team. He's so insane that he would pay whatever it took to get a team.

 

[Deleted member 38182]

is there an escalator clause in the Hansen/Maloof agreement?

 

[dmbrhs]

is there an escalator clause in the Hansen/Maloof agreement?

Considering Hansen released a public statement about it (on his website), they must have been able to increase it somehow.

 

[Deleted member 38182]

is there an escalator clause in the Hansen/Maloof agreement?

Considering Hansen released a public statement about it (on his website), they must have been able to increase it somehow.

I actually copied and pasted the statement to the Kings thread, but I meant when Sacramento matches, is their a clause that automatically raises Hansen's bid some more?

 

[dmbrhs]

I actually copied and pasted the statement to the Kings thread, but I meant when Sacramento matches, is their a clause that automatically raises Hansen's bid some more?

Gotcha. Considering they may have never anticipated a competing offer, probably not. Ballmer is the wild card at this point. He's the type of guy who would sell his kids in order to get what he wants. I've witnessed old co-workers under Ballmer bid $5,000 on chocolate cakes at high school fundraisers in order to establish dominance. It's part of the culture. When it comes to a ****-swinging contest, the Microsoft folks are no joke lol.

 

[Deleted member 38182]

Makes sense. It'll be interesting to see how far of a bidding war the NBA will allow.

A few Sac media folks have been saying to expect more news come Monday.... This next weeks is gonna be nuts

 

[hennessy co]

Wow, it's crazy reading all this information being that I go to the gym that Steve and slick watts goes to on the regular. Real cool dudes

 

[hennessy co]

Double

 

[dakid23]

From SI.com this morning

Where will the Kings play next season? The NBA's heart says Sacramento, and its head says Seattle.
The wallet favors Seattle as well, following a decision late Friday by its potential ownership group to raise its overall bid to a league-record $550 million. Prior to kicking in the additional $25 million, the Seattle group already had an agreement with the Maloof family to buy 65 percent of the Kings.

The sentiment of maintaining the team's roots continues to benefit the potential ownership group in Sacramento. However, the dollars and facts that separate the two competing bids stand decidedly in favor of a move to the Pacific Northwest, according to a league source who attended Seattle's presentation to eight NBA owners last week in New York.
"We've never had a situation like this," said commissioner David Stern last week. Instead of calling for a vote on the future of the Kings at the board of governors meeting April 18-19, Stern warned of a delay on a final decision in order to give owners more time to analyze the choice between moving the team to Seattle and keeping it in Sacramento. The delay has created more time for Sacramento, which also presented its own plan to keep the Kings. Sacramento has been scrambling to assemble an ownership group and arena strategy that can compete with Seattle, which has been developing its plan for more than two years.
It is going to be a hard decision either way because something more than money is involved as Sacramento fights to keep its team. Seattle's fans understand the pain: Their Sonics were moved to Oklahoma City in 2008 because local government would not work with the NBA to build a new arena.

The passion of Seattle to regain what was lost was displayed throughout its presentation, in which the group, led by investor Chris Hansen -- and backed by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer -- emphasized the strengths of its bid while relentlessly pointing out the weaknesses of Sacramento's plan. The league source told SI.com that the main points on behalf of Seattle included:
• A franchise in Seattle would pay into the NBA's new revenue-sharing plan, while Sacramento would be receiving bailouts from revenue-sharing.
• The economy of Seattle is growing, while Sacramento's is shrinking -- and media rights for an NBA franchise in Seattle would be almost double the rights fees earned by Sacramento.
• A new arena in Sacramento cannot be built within three years, as proposed by Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson. Based on an intrinsic set of checks-and-balances in California that have delayed local stadium projects by the Giants and 49ers, the Kings can expect to need at least six years to complete a new arena in Sacramento. The current site for a new arena in downtown Sacramento may not be viable.
The Seattle group laid out the recent history of arena building projects in the Sacramento region for NBA owners. The 49ers began their project to build a facility in Santa Clara, 88 miles from Sacramento, in August 2008; the new stadium is expected to open in 2014. The Giants launched their new stadium project 75 miles from Sacramento in April 1996, and it opened in 2000. The Warriors began work on a new arena in December 2012 with an anticipated opening in 2017.

Sacramento faces numerous issues in its attempt to complete its new arena project. The proposed downtown site involves at least 25 parcels of land that are controlled by five independent owners. Two previous attempts to plan an arena at the site have been abandoned because of high costs and other complications.
A 2004 Sacramento city cost estimate revealed that one million square feet would be demolished and more than 1,000 jobs would be displaced. ]The same report by the city valued the "hard costs" of building an arena downtown at $559 million. The current Sacramento plan prices the same work in 2013 at the same site at $345 million. In other words, according to the presentation made by Seattle, the Sacramento bid projects that the costs of land acquisition, demolition, infrastructure, construction and other overhead charges have fallen inexplicably by $214 million over the last nine years.

A 2005 Sacramento City Council report investigated the current downtown site and concluded: "This site has been previously studied and evaluated ... it offers exciting opportunities within a downtown setting yet has significant development issues. Due to its existing use as an urban shopping mall, this site is expensive to purchase and prepare for construction. Demolition and construction are difficult to complete without disruption to existing businesses. In addition, there are issues associated with historic structures. Staff believes that the costs associated with this site, as estimated by the consultant team, make it infeasible."
Sacramento's current plan calls for a new arena to open on this site in 2016.
No such issues exist for the Seattle site on the southern edge of downtown. The parcel is owned entirely by the group that is trying to buy the Kings. Hansen began working to purchase the land before his interest in building an NBA arena became public.
The economies of the two competing cities was another big part of Seattle's presentation to NBA owners. The online retailer Amazon is building a 3.3 million square-foot campus in Seattle that will serve as one of the country's largest corporate headquarters in a city location. As many as 17,000 young college-educated workers are expected to be hired by Amazon in Seattle, which could increase Seattle's annual GDP by more than 15 percent.

Hansen's group told NBA owners that Seattle has 13 companies rated in the Fortune 1000; Sacramento has none. The Seattle economy has been ranked among the top five in the U.S. for the last four years, according to the independent research firm POLICOM, while Sacramento has dropped from No. 19 in 2011 to No. 55 this year. The Seattle group told owners that Sacramento's fall has been structural rather than cyclical, based on Sacramento's emphasis on residential home construction leading up to the recent housing crisis. When the housing bubble burst, the Sacramento economy was hit hard. Seattle's 32,555 season-ticket requests at the time of the meeting last week was more than three times the number of pledges of Sacramento.
Seattle also questioned Sacramento's claim of being a one-sport market that would give all of its attention to the NBA. Seattle's presentation to NBA owners emphasized that six rival major sports franchises operate in the Bay Area with 90 miles of Sacramento. Five have their games broadcast in Sacramento -- and the 49ers, Raiders and Giants all drew larger TV ratings in Sacramento in 2012 than the Kings.
The 2008 departure of the Sonics has appeared to influence Stern's approach to the movement of franchises -- and therefore made it more difficult for Seattle to regain an NBA franchise. When the Hornets were in danger of being sold to an owner who might have moved the franchise out of New Orleans, Stern took the drastic step of using NBA money to buy the franchise. He was committed to keeping the team in New Orleans and sold the team for $338 million to Tom Benson, the local owner of the Saints, who next season will rebrand them as the Pelicans while entrenching the team in Louisiana.
"He can't have a second incident of helping a team leave a market," said an NBA owner of Stern. "Seattle was bad enough. And I'm sure he feels that Seattle had a chance to keep the team the first time around.
"The bottom line is that the incumbent always gets the last shot. You don't want teams moving around."
Stern's interim ownership of the Hornets resulted in one of the worst incidents of his career: the alleged "veto" of the trade that would have sent Hornets star Chris Paul to the Lakers. After enduring so much criticism on behalf of the Hornets and regarding the larger principle of keeping teams in their home markets -- a principle that surely improves the legacy of a retiring commissioner -- Stern has been consistent in giving the Kings one last chance to remain in Sacramento.

But Stern may not have the power to influence owners to see things as he sees them.
"I think their whole business plan is flawed -- that the real estate numbers don't work, that they don't have enough money to make any of it happen," the owner said of Sacramento group's proposal to buy the Kings and prevent them from moving to Seattle. "So from all I can tell right now, it fails.
"But," the owner added, "that could change if they brought in someone with big dollars."
The inherent problems of building an arena in Sacramento and the prosperity of the Seattle market may be crucial. It was, after all, the pursuit of revenues that prompted the NBA to lock out players two years ago -- and by awarding the franchise to Seattle, the NBA would be righting a wrong of five years ago.
It will be interesting to see whether the increased bid emphasizes the financial differences that separate the two groups and their competing cities. There was no demand for Seattle to up its price. Based on their binding agreement, the Maloofs could not ask for more money. At the same time, the expensive gesture shows that the Seattle partners would come to the NBA with deeper pockets than the recently-assembled group in Sacramento, which had yet to formally match the previous valuation of $525 million.
No matter how this plays out, the result will be bittersweet. One traditional NBA community will be spurned and angry. Each city brings enormous value to the league, and so the league must decide, sooner than later, where its best future lies -- in Sacramento or in Seattle? With the heart, or with the head?


Read More: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/nb...kings-sale-david-stern-seattle/#ixzz2QMP0i2s2

From an NBA.com Aldridge Article

While numerous reports insisted the group, now led by TIBCO founder and Warriors minority owner Vivek Ranadive, had told both the league and the Maloofs that they would match, a source directly involved in the negotiations said late Friday that the Maloofs have received no indication, written or otherwise, that the Ranadive group will match.

 

[dub 253]

^Good article. That's what it comes down to: Head vs heart.

There's no way you can argue that SAC is a better place financially for the team than Seattle, but SAC does have a chance for the sentimental reasons.

 

[dmbrhs]

^Good article. That's what it comes down to: Head vs heart.

There's no way you can argue that SAC is a better place financially for the team than Seattle, but SAC does have a chance for the sentimental reasons.

I've been saying that since the beginning.

 

[Deleted member 38182]

Definitely a good break down of seattle's presentation from last week.

Will post rebuttal when I get home

Actually out of respect to this thread I'll just keep it in our Kings thread

Not trying to rustle jimmies here

 

[Shanegerous]

This upcoming week will be the longest of my life. Good luck to sac on keeping the team but I really want the Sonics back...

 

[dmbrhs]

Great piece about Hansen by the Seattle Times. Although, I can't help but wonder if this was some sort of trade off for the Times actually endorsing the arena. They've been on the side of the Port since the beginning, then randomly changed their tone a couple months back. Considering how much went into this piece, length of time it took to research it and get the interviews conveniently lines up....hmmmmm. Anyway, I've highlighted the timeline part:

http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2020775555_hansenprofilexml.html

In November 2010, when Hansen and his kids joined in San Francisco’s celebrations after the Giants won the World Series, he decided to make a serious play to bring the NBA back to Seattle. The celebration reminded him of the Sonics’ 1979 NBA championship and the city’s inability to get a new basketball team after the Sonics moved in 2008.

“No one was kick-starting it,” said Hansen, who began analyzing arena sites and teams for sale.

In early 2011, Hansen, through his friend Irv Grousbeck, a cable-company founder and a co-owner of the NBA’s Boston Celtics, was introduced by email to Wally Walker, the former Sonics player and team executive.

Walker had only a “mild, distant register” of Hansen, who in 2008 had made an overture to join an investment group that proposed to renovate KeyArena, where the Sonics played, as part of a last-ditch effort to keep the team in Seattle.

With his own background in the investment world, Walker called someone he knew — Griffin, Hansen’s former boss at Blue Ridge. After Griffin’s favorable recommendation and several phone conversations with Hansen, Walker met him for breakfast in a restaurant at Seattle’s Fairmont Olympic Hotel to discuss Hansen’s vision.

Walker set up a meeting with Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn. On June 16, 2011, Hansen, McGinn and a small group met for lunch at the Rainier Club, the 125-year-old private enclave where some of the city’s biggest deals have been cut.

Walker also arranged a meeting at his office in July between Hansen and King County Executive Dow Constantine.

In both meetings, Hansen proposed building an arena with no new taxes. Intrigued, McGinn and Constantine promised to keep Hansen’s effort confidential, which gave Hansen months to quietly buy what he describes as $70 million of properties in Sodo. Publicity could have inflated costs or killed the developing deal.

It wasn’t until December 2011 that The Seattle Times broke the news of Hansen’s groundwork.

Hansen maneuvered Seattle’s political and media terrain by employing some of the city’s top public-relations consultants to push his plans and tailor his message.

In February 2012, McGinn and Constantine unveiled what they called a risk-free proposal from Hansen to build a sports-and-entertainment arena with $290 million provided by private investors and up to $200 million in taxes generated by the arena. But the plan met resistance, mainly from maritime and industry interests.

At the same time, Hansen wanted his investment group to include someone with deep pockets whom the public would recognize not only by name but by wealth.

Through Walker, Hansen met Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, a billionaire long interested in NBA ownership.

Walker also connected Hansen to Erik and Peter Nordstrom, wealthy brothers with large stakes in the Seattle-based department-store chain bearing their name.

By June, Hansen publicly revealed that Ballmer and the Nordstrom brothers were part of his group. Although it wasn’t disclosed how much Hansen or the others planned to invest, the addition of Ballmer, worth an estimated $15 billion, eliminated the need to to look for other investors.

Hansen said he plans to invest far more than the 15 percent thresholdrequired by the NBA to be the majority partner of the team. He also revealed Walker would be a small investor.

 

[Bert.]

so whats going on now? when is this gonna end?