How One Sports Owners Death Is About to Reshape The NBA And NFL
Paul Allen’s death set off a chain reaction involving two major franchises. One is now officially for sale, and a long-forgotten clause might soon make the other fair game for billionaires everywhere.
An intelligent subscriber of ours emailed me this week asking some questions about the Portland Trail Blazers sale. Typically, I would just respond to this directly over email, but there are some interesting caveats here that the wider group should know.
The Trail Blazers will sell for a huge number. Portland is one of the NBA’s smallest markets, but recent sales in Dallas ($4 billion), Phoenix ($4 billion), and Boston ($6.1 billion), combined with the league’s new $76 billion media rights package, will probably push the final number closer to $3.75 billion or potentially even $4 billion.
Many people have been speculating on potential buyers. We’ll get to that! However, the more intriguing angle is that the impending Trail Blazers sale could kick off a domino effect that eventually leads to the Seattle Seahawks changing hands, too.
Billionaire Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen owned both of these teams. The Seattle native purchased the Trail Blazers for $70 million in 1988 and the Seahawks for $200 million in 1997, and he was a big reason why neither team ended up getting relocated to a larger city. But when Allen passed away in 2018, he wasn’t married and he didn’t have any kids, so he left both the Trail Blazers and Seahawks to his sister, Jody Allen.