Recent news surrounding the Kings and the new Arena proposal has centered on the dramatic nine-hour closed-door negotiations in Orlando with the NBA commissioner David Stern, Kevin Johnson and the Maloofs all together in one room. We all saw the video clip of a tired and exhausted KJ emerging from the negotiating room, KJ, the martyr (on another note – damn dude, you used to play in the NBA, does talking for 9 hours really make you that tired? – come watch my 10 month old for a day).
Here is a perplexing question. Why doesn’t the NBA want the Kings to move to Anaheim or Seattle? Why is the NBA even entertaining the idea of keeping the Kings in Sacramento? If you look at the situation objectively from the NBA’s perspective, it seems like the logical move. Anaheim has a move-in ready stadium, a large potential fanbase with a lot of disposable income.
Some may claim that the reason the NBA doesn’t move is because of the Maloofs. It is not the Maloofs. The Maloofs are in dire financial circumstances they have sold most of their stake in the Palms in Las Vegas and have sold off their beverage distribution company. All they have left is the Kings. Thus, the Maloofs have no real leverage in any arena discussion. They just do what the NBA tells them to do. If they had any leverage, they would be in Anaheim. Therefore, we can take the Maloofs out of the discussion.
Thus, the question remaining is why doesn’t the NBA want the Kings to move?
The answer is that the NBA wants to be able to continue to use Anaheim and Seattle as bargaining chips in its negotiations with other cities that are hesitant to build new arenas.
A number of other cities are currently involved in arena negotiations with their respective teams, including Portland, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Oakland (Warriors). If the NBA let the Kings move to Anaheim, they would lose a strong bargaining chip they can use against these cities seeking a new arena. If the Kings move to Anaheim the NBA can no longer say to Minneapolis, Portland, Detroit or Oakland: “Hey if you don’t give [your team] a new arena they will move to Anaheim and you will have nothing.” They will have lost a valuable bargaining chip they can use against those cities. Now if the NBA had not been able to extort an arena deal out of Sacramento, I think they would have been more than willing to let the Kings move to Anaheim. But instead, the NBA now has the best of both worlds; they have extorted a new arena out of Sacramento, while still hanging on to the City of Anaheim for use in future negotiations with other cities. Negotiations I can guarantee will proceed in almost an identical way.
Despite what his loudest supporters claim, Kevin Johnson (whether he knows it or not), is not responsible for keeping the Kings in Sacramento. He was just a willing participant in a fraudulent scheme concocted by the NBA to extort a team out of Sacramento.
