If you, Seattle sports fan, feel lately as if you’ve been taking in local developments at the pace of a waterfall, welcome to the, well, glub.
Traditionally the final week in March features the Mariners’ home opener and a flame-out by Gonzaga in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The third-seeded Zags already delivered, losing to 11th-seeded Texas in the second round Saturday. The Mariners are on tap Thursday, booking a pre-game unveiling of a rare artifact unseen hereabouts practically since Doc Maynard was an intern — an American League West divisional pennant. Shut up, Yankees and Dodgers fans — the M’s 50-year warm-up is over. Snicker at your peril.
NBA news is usurping the scheduled fare this week. The league’s Board of Governors is reported to have scheduled a vote in New York on Wednesday regarding continuing expansion plans for Seattle and Las Vegas to join the league for the 2028-29 season.
Yes, we all understand that these reports since the Sonics’ departure in 2008 have caused basketball fans to go all Homer Simpson after another cruel trick from Mr. Burns. But apparently the oligarchs have discerned an expiration date for the curse applied to Seattle by their late commissioner, David Stern. Or maybe it was the recent announcement by Howard Schultz, the former SuperSonics owner who sold the club to Oklahoma City prairie pirates, that he was leaving Seattle to reside in Florida. Even the oligarchs didn’t want to be around Schultz.
Further buttressing the strong hint of a potential Sonics’ return was the news Monday that the owners of the NHL Seattle Kraken created an umbrella organization, One Roof Sports and Entertainment, to be the majority owner of Climate Pledge Arena. Oak View Group built the renovated KeyArena, which opened four years ago as a premier concert venue and can accommodate the Kraken, WNBA and an NBA return. OVG sold shares to One Roof, led by longtime Seattle sports executive Tod Leiweke, and kept a minority position. OVG will continue to operate the building.
The timing of the change, just ahead of the NBA vote, suggests that One Roof now has an edge in determining ownership of the NBA team. Kraken owner Samantha Holloway obviously wants her fellow investors to own the hoops team too, instead of a third party that might make scheduling demands that would create conflict. The expected expansion fee for the new Sonics owners is likely more than $6 billion. For that amount, a new entity would expect premium dates and other priorities. Holloway would much rather own both winter sports teams and the building in harmony.
Also in the same arena this week is another newsmaker: The WNBA Storm. Seattle’s franchise was part of an astonishing new collective bargaining agreement between the league and its players. The average annual salary will approach $600,000. Top players, such as former Storm star Breanna Stewart, can make up to $1.4 million. Each team’s salary cap is $7 million, compared to $1.5 million in 2025. Maybe the most startling way to put it is that the new floor—a minimum salary of $300,000—exceeds that of the highest-paid player in the 2025 season. First regular season game is May 8.
The backdrop to all these abrupt dramas is the largest, and quietest local sports story: The Seahawks are for sale. Only four other times has the NFL seen a franchise sold after winning a Super Bowl, and for only the third time in the Seahawks’ 50 seasons will the team be dealt. In August, Sportico estimated the value at $6.5 billion.
If you see me in a bar, don’t ask who’s buying the Seahawks without buying me a beer. I have said, “I don’t know” so many times that I deserve many drinks. I can safely assume that the sale will be competitive, because oligarchs love being part of a monopoly. This particular monopoly is so successful that its champion just paid Jaxon Smith-Njigba $168.6 million overall—$42.15 million in each of the final four seasons—making him the highest-paid wide receiver in NFL history. One reason the Seahawks could afford to pay so much for someone who touches the ball relatively few times is that the NFL salary cap has crossed the $300 million threshold for the first time. Four years ago, it crossed $200 million for the first time.
Many current global situations aren’t yielding results.
Seattle sports is not one of them
By the way: Seattle hosts six World Cup games starting June 15, including Team USA June 19.
World Series starts Oct. 23. Mariners are the third-best betting favorite behind the Dodgers and Yankees.
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It’s funny, the year the Sonics left, the Apple Cup was between WSU and Washington, both winless. Both the Seahawks and Mariners were having poor seasons.
Now, it feels like the reverse, with a possible return of the Sonics.
You forgot to mention in that woeful year is when we learned the semi-venerable Seattle P-I would be no more. I don’t think a reversal is in view.
Ceiling to floor: $300K. Wow. Good on the WNBA and its players to recognize value, but that’s a heck of an adjustment. Caitlin Clark effect (along with many others)?
It also helps prevent players from playing overseas to supplement their incomes. Had salaries been higher, the Brittney Griner episode a few years ago could’ve been avoided, as she wouldn’t have had to join a Russian team in the WNBA off-season for financial reasons.
As for the Sonics, I won’t believe it until it’s official. I’ve seen far too many false starts, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the NBA does a fake-out and expands to Louisville or even Mexico City.
Chasing the bigger money overseas helped shorten more than a few careers of the best women players. Per expansion, this time I don’t think owners would vote 30-0 if the NBA hadn’t done its due diligence. Which is not to say there isn’t still a trap door in play. The biggest current concern is the obvious spread of tanking to earn higher draft picks. A reasonable argument can be made by basketball purists to suggest this current brand of lame ball is an unworthy association.
Here’s the PWHL’s idea to prevent tanking: The team that gains the most points after being eliminated from playoff contention gets the first overall pick. This encourages teams to still compete even when they’re out of it, and prevents a team eliminated on the last day of the season getting lucky with the draft lottery.
We haven’t seen it really tested yet; the top four of the six teams qualified for the playoffs, and one of the two other teams was well out of it early. Now with expansion and four of the eight teams missing the playoffs, we’ll see its true value.
Great story! And good on Smith-Njigba for getting that record haul. He deserves every penny he can squeeze out of those sports oligarchs. They wouldn’t pay him that much money, unless they were rolling in it. Which they are.
Also, you say Sonics might be returning to Seattle? Remind me again: Who are the Sonics? Are they that team in Oklahoma? Or are they the one in Florida that the nice young man from Seattle plays so brilliantly for? Gee, maybe Howard Schultz will buy that team and move it to Seattle. Would they let him do that? Again? But wait, he’s leaving Seattle for Florida. Never mind.
I’m a girl and this is men’s professional sports, so no wonder it’s all a muddle to me. I guess I’ll just keep watching the Storm and the Reign and the Torrent until this all blows over. And the Mariners, because that retractable roof beats an umbrella organization any day.
As an OWG, I’ve come to conclusion that women’s sports are simply better entertainment than what’s offered by their male counterparts. The NBA is basically a Lebron James personality cult, and the games have devolved mostly into 3 pt shooting drudgefests.
The “W” plays the games the way I learned them – passing, set plays, give and go, pick and rolls. A real actual team sport. Torrent hockey is a gas!
You left out UW Women’s softball. Does however require an umbrella (organization).
Well, aren’t you having wiseacre fun in a target-rich environment.
It was a very wise “preemptive strike” by Samantha Holloway to buy a majority share of CPA. With a franchise fee in the $7-10bn range, she ran the risk of the NBA awarding the Sonics franchise to an outside “whale”, with said whale buying majority ownership of CPA and thus consigning the Kraken to second-class tenants in the arena they made possible. Now (presumably) the Kraken have first “krak” (sorry) should any scheduling conflicts arise with the Sonics. And of course, a larger share of the concert revenues, which are the real money-maker for most arenas (venues) anyway.
I never understood the logic behind establishing franchise fees for expansion teams. A price of $7bn would rank the Sonics as the fifth most valuable team (Forbes) – higher than the Boston Celtics and behind only Golden State, NY Knicks and the two LA teams. Give me a break.
Of course, I’m not factoring in the greed head factor of current owners, and the insatiable envy/desire of (stupid wealth) outsiders to become members of the “sports team billionaires club” – the most exclusive of all groups on the planet. The rationalization is that (regardless of cashflow) franchise values always go up, as there’s always a lineup of people (with stupid unspent wealth) to take a team off your hands. In the investment field (my former profession) we used to refer to this as the “greater fool” theory of investing. It’d be great entertainment if logic ever infiltrated this “industry” and owners suffered from a great reset.
Probably not in my lifetime though.
As an investments guy, you figure to know the worthiness of buying a 1/30 share of a monopoly business. Regarding the size of franchise fees, the numbers are not set, but subject to the marketplace. We know the Blazers are selling for $4.2M, the Celtics went for $6B and the Lakers for $10B. So you can hazard a guess where the SEA expansion comes in, keeping in mind that this is the last expansion for a very long time.
Although a bust is not probable, only possible, all sports is now all about money, which makes the world go around but can be (especially because of gambling) the root of harbinger of destruction.