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The story of Tom Dundon as a sports franchise owner in 2026 is, in many ways, a tale of two cities. Out east in Raleigh, the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes captured their first Stanley Cup in 20 years—and the first of Dundon’s tenure as majority owner after he took over the team in 2017. On the West Coast, his newer franchise, the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers, made a surprising run to the playoffs ... which Dundon’s aggressive cost-cutting measures largely overshadowed.
Dundon’s frugality has already brought significant negative attention to the Blazers, and now he is embroiled in a standoff with the city over expensive renovations to Moda Center, the franchise’s city-owned home since its opening in 1995, ahead of the end of the Trail Blazers lease with the arena in 2030.
The Oregon House of Representatives have voted to provide $365 million in taxpayer funds for the project, which has been previously estimated at $600 million. Additionally, Portland Mayor Keith Wilson has pledged $120 million and Multnomah County is expected to contribute to the total. Dundon and franchise ownership has resisted chipping in for the renovations.
Now, Blazers leadership is ripping the term sheet delivered by the city, with one unnamed team source telling The Athletic, “I think we are very far apart.”
According to The Oregonian, the terms include a 20-year requirement for the Trail Blazers to play all home games at the renovated Portland arena, an agreement for the arena to feature unionized jobs or those that pay a family living wage and an annual $3 million payment to be divided between the county and Portland public schools.
Many of the provisions are non-starters with the franchise, a team official told The Oregonian. “Why is the city sending this thing knowing that we’re not going to agree to it?”
The team official told the paper that the Trail Blazers are offering a “sweetheart deal” by not pushing for a brand new arena, slamming the local officials, and making an indication that the franchise could look elsewhere if no lease agreement is reached.
“And they’re making it complicated,” the official said. “And if they want to say no, if they don’t want us, then that’s fine.”
Of course, relocation is not a straightforward matter. The NBA is currently evaluating expansion options, with hopes of nailing down whether to grow from 30 to 32 teams by the end of the year. Las Vegas and Seattle are the two cities that the league is focused on.
While it feels inevitable that the NBA will add teams in both markets at some point, growth requires the league’s current owners to take a reduced slice of the league pie, from 1/30th to 1/32nd. Therefore, if they don’t believe expansion will guarantee growth enough to overcome those reduced shares, it may not happen just yet.
“We haven’t made an ultimate decision to expand yet,” Silver told CNBC last week. “Part of it is, is it accretive overall to the league? And then the next issue is, who are the partners? ... Yes, price matters, but it’s not one of those auctions where, here’s a contract, we’ve just left blank the price and fill it in.”
Silver certainly won’t out-and-out say that the owners would be open to the Trail Blazers relocating in the event that they can’t come to an agreement with Portland, and as a team source told The Athletic, “No one with the Blazers has ever said we want to move. We don’t want that. We want to stay in Portland.”
But if expansion falls through and the NBA still has a chance to land a team in what they perceive as a a higher-value market like Seattle or Vegas, the risk to Portland is there. And the team official that spoke to The Oregonian was certainly not afraid to stoke those fears, even if the price to move is fair higher than it would be to stay in Portland and assist with the renovated Moda Center.
“It’s not like we lose money moving the team,” the official said. “We might spend money, but we don’t lose money. It might be O.K. to spend a billion dollars on a relocation fee if the valuation of the team doubles. Of course you would do that.”
The end of December brings two important deadlines, which as of now remain separate: the Trail Blazers’ to lock in state funds to renovate the Moda Center, and the NBA’s to expand by the 2028–29 season. While officials haven’t gone on the record to say the quiet part out loud, given ownership’s outward frustrations with the state of negotiations and their lack of inherent connections to the area to begin with—Dundon was raised in Texas and runs his businesses out of Dallas, and has his other professional team in North Carolina—the risks are beginning to feel very real.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as NBA Expansion Debate Looms Over Trail Blazers’ Moda Center Standoff With Portland.
