Bob Whitsitt: ‘On my watch, no Trail Blazer ever went to jail’
If you were a fan of the NBA in the 1990s and early aughts, the name Bob Whitsitt probably rings a bell. Dubbed ‘Trader Bob’, Whitsitt was instrumental in transforming the Supersonics and Trail Blazers into powerhouses in the Western Conference. He was the one who drafted Shawn Kemp and then Gary Payton the following year to set Seattle up to contend for years.
Whitsitt is coming out with his own book, Game Changer: An Insider’s Story of the Sonics’ Resurgence, the Trail Blazers’ Turnaround, and the Deal that Saved the Seahawks, which is set to be released on October 10, 2023, and goes into detail about his experiences as a basketball executive. Whitsitt talked with HoopsHype about his nickname ‘Trader Bob’, his thoughts on the Damian Lillard situation, Seattle as a potential expansion team, and more.
You were one of the youngest executives in the league at the time. How did you get a foot in the door?
Bob Whitsitt: I came out of graduate school from Ohio State with a master’s in sports administration. I had no contacts, I had no relationships, but I thought I could parlay that into an internship and get my foot in the door. Literally, I wrote letters to every NFL team, every NBA team or Major League Baseball team, you name it, and I got rejected by virtually everybody. But at the last hour, I got an interview with the Indiana Pacers. I think four of us went to Indianapolis and I was lucky enough to get hired as the intern.
I was determined once I got my foot in the door to never see where the exit door was. Literally in four years’ time, there was a lot of financial instability in the NBA, the league was a lot different back then. We had an ownership change. People didn’t get their paychecks for six weeks. So as the dust was settling, I was kind of being promoted up the ladder. And usually it was more title because it wasn’t economic promotion. I woke up and I was the assistant general manager at age 24, and one of my big tasks was negotiating our first-round pick, Clark Kellogg. And I gotta tell you, I wasn’t really prepared to negotiate. I wasn’t experienced enough, but I got a really good deal done with the Pacers because our owners made it real simple.
We have a million dollars that we can pay Clark over five years. So 200 grand a year back was probably worth about $2 million over the five-year period, or 400 grand a year. It was a very tough negotiation, but I literally gave them everything we had and somehow got them to take the deal. Clark kind of got screwed, to be honest, he got under-market value. But people started to notice me like, how did he get such a great deal. And frankly, it was simply because that’s all the money we had. And then I think as a young guy, you start to gain experience and you get relationships around the league, I then took a job in Kansas City, that franchise was struggling and we did the best we could but I was the point person to move to Kansas City – the Kings franchise to Sacramento.
We did something that had never been done before. We sold a naming rights sponsorship to the building. Prior to that, arenas did not have commercial names on them. So, I sold the deal to Arco and that became Arco Arena.
I think that one item, that giant billboard, caught the attention of the Sonics owner. He was a media person. He owned some radio, TV, but he owned a lot of billboards. And I think the light bulb went on, like, oh my gosh, this guy just sold the greatest billboard in the history of billboards. And maybe he can come up here and help get our team out of the rut. And maybe we can build an arena and we can sell a naming rights deal.
So at age 30, I was hired as president and general manager for the Sonics, and either you’re gonna make it work really fast, or you’re gonna be fired, and probably never get a job again in the NBA. So I was pretty aggressive and did a lot of moves. My first year, we took a team that was 31-51. And we pretty much gutted the whole team except for Tom Chambers and Xavier McDaniel. Brought in a lot of guys and made it to the Conference Finals in our first year.
How did you get the nickname Trader Bob?
BW: That came from the media. I think really, my first year in Seattle, I was making all these trades. Trading Jack Sikma, trading Al Wood, trading all these guys that were established NBA players. I think a lot of the media around the league thought that these other general managers were fleecing me because I was the young inexperienced guy. I kind of used that to my advantage. I wanted to be fleeced, but I wanted to be fleeced where I wanted to be fleeced. I knew who I wanted to get rid of and who I wanted to get, and I wanted to let those established GMs think they were getting the advantage on me.
But they had a bunch of little nicknames, but the one that stuck was Trader Bob because I think the first season I made nine trades. As you know, there’s not a lot of trades that go on in the NBA. I mean there are but you won’t find a lot of GMs that made a lot of trades in one season. Everybody’s talking about rebuilding all the time. And I laugh when I see that because most of the people who use the phrase, they’ve never even built so you have to build something before you can tell your market I’m going to rebuild and I think to build something or to rebuild, you really have to be aggressive.
So, Trader Bob, because I made a lot of trades. Fortunately, most of it worked out. But I think I got the reputation that I was willing and many times wanted to make a deal. So I wouldn’t say I was Monty Hall on Let’s Make a Deal, but I wanted to take a slow walk-it-up in-court team and build it into a full court team that would run and extend the court defensively and was athletic. So I had a different style I wanted us to play, which required different types of players and the fact the team hadn’t made the playoffs for the two previous years. It’s a lot easier to rip up a team that’s had no success than it is to tinker with a team that’s doing pretty well.
In terms of making transactions, what was your biggest regret?
BW: Well, I could second guess every deal. There’s always something I can do better. There’s no question about it. I think the one thing I fought for at the time, and I was overruled, and I don’t mean that in the wrong way… at the end of the day, I’m an employee, I do the best I can do but owners ultimately make the final decision on everything. But I drafted a player in the first round in Portland. It was the 1996 draft, Jermaine O’Neal.
He didn’t bloom quite as quickly as Kobe did. They were the same draft but he was blooming and I knew he was gonna be a really good player. Around 1999 or 2000, somewhere in there, maybe 2001, we were in a situation where we were going to lose Brian Grant to unrestricted free agency and the owner just didn’t want to give him a new seven-year contract at the max because he has some injury history and I didn’t disagree with that. I wish we could have kept Brian but I just couldn’t talk them into a three- or four-year contract, which is as far as the owner was willing to go. He was able to get a seven-year max from Miami, so we knew we were going to lose him.
But at that time, rather than trade and bring Shawn Kemp in – which I really wanted to do – we traded Jermaine for Dale Davis, we would get a player a little bit more seasoned and probably can help us win a little bit more right now, but Jermaine was good enough that I knew if he got the playing time, and with Brian leaving, the playing time would open up. I wish we could have kept him. Then I would have had a young guy in place for the next 10-15 years. I don’t know if we would have won it that way, but I would rather keep a guy that I knew was on track to be an All-Star and was young as opposed to bringing in a guy in who only had a couple of years left in them. We traded Jermaine to Indiana, and I think he was a four, five, six-time All-Star.
So I get when you’re in the now-mode and the coach and everybody wants to have the little extra veteran piece. But sometimes you’d like to stay a little bit more [for the future]. This guy is pretty good, but more importantly, in three or four years, he’ll be really good. As a general manager that’s always wrestling with the now versus the tomorrow. So that’s one I wish I could have maybe done a little bit better and hung on to the younger player as opposed to bringing in a veteran player.
What was your biggest regret as a GM for the Blazers and Sonics?
BW: Well, I think the biggest regret would be the same for both of them. We did not win the championship. In both cases, I’ve built teams that came very, very close. Tthe Sonics, we had the best record in the NBA, when I left, we were 63-19. The year prior, we took Phoenix, the Game 7 of the Conference Finals. That’s when [Charles] Barkley was the MVP, and he’s probably had the game of his life. I think he had about 44 and 24, in Game 7. And again, they probably shot about 35 more free throws than we did. That’s the ulcer, I don’t want to get the ulcer worked up again. But we were very close to winning.
And then the following year, I thought we really had the best team. We had the best record, but we were upset in the first round by [Dikembe] Mutumbo, and the Nuggets. Five game series, we lost Game 5 in overtime. But you know, playoffs often times are about matchups. I’ve been on the other side, I had a team where we were ranked seventh and we upset the Mavericks. And we upset [Hakeem] Olajuwon in Houston and got to the final. So it’s matchups and things can happen.
My Blazers team that was really good in 2000. That might be the best team in my view to never win a championship. We took Kobe and Shaq to Game 7 of the Conference Finals. And that was their first championship. And I think we were up about 13 or 15 in the fourth quarter. I think both teams shot 10 free throws in the first half, and suddenly they shot like 23 more free throws than we did for the game. And again, I leave the conspiracy theory aside. We really kind of choked, we had a lot of really good shots in the fourth quarter. I think we shot maybe like 15% or 20% or something. We had all star caliber players getting really good shots, and we missed them. So putting the free builds aside, we just missed shots at the wrong time, but that was a hell of a basketball team.
What was your philosophy or thought process like in how you value players on talent versus their character? You were at the helm of the Blazers during the ‘Jail Blazers’ years, and got a lot of criticism from fans and media. What was that like?
BW: The Jail Blazers, which is the cute name. It’s just like, the Bad Boys in Detroit. Do you want to be labeled a bad boy? It’s a cute thing. On my watch, no Trail Blazer ever went to jail. If players were arrested before I got there, they were arrested after I left. Really what we did is we built a great basketball team and we were in the Top 5 of the NBA in attendance. So whatever you want to call us, you can call us. But if we have a great team, and we’re playing well, the fans are going to show up. Whereas three years after I left, they hadn’t made the playoffs for three straight years and they had the lowest attendance in the NBA.
So put the cute stuff aside for a minute. I think when you evaluate players, I always start with talent. Can that guy play and is he going to get better? Then I look at style of play, health records, age, all those things. Character is extremely important, work ethic is extremely important. The biggest one, which is the hardest one to really find out but I spend a lot of time on is, does he love to play the game of basketball? Because if you pay a guy, hundreds of millions of dollars, and he doesn’t really love to play the game, you’re not going to get everything you want out of that guy. So I want guys who really love to play the game and will play hard and play with passion and love to compete.
Then as you put your team together, you’re always hoping you get this great chemistry, which is a really interesting word. I wrote this in my book, I would do what I would call a chess move, I would take a player that has no value on our team, and trade them for somebody else that’s pretty talented, but maybe a pain or challenging personality. But my idea was that player that I’m acquiring isn’t going to be with me long term, I’m going to get the most out of that player. And if that player is playing significant minutes on my team, and my team is winning a lot of games, suddenly, there’s gonna be somebody in the league that wants this guy, because he’s no longer a bad apple on a bad team. He’s a challenging personality on a great team.
The classic example was JR Rider. I traded some non-role players for JR Rider, who was a talented but troubled guy on a bad basketball team in Minnesota. Now, he was challenging in a lot of maintenance for us in Portland, no question about it. But he was also highly productive. And once we built up a team that got to the Conference Finals, then other teams around the league wanted JR, but before that nobody would touch him with a 10-foot pole.
I then traded JR for an All-Star named Steve Smith, who was the J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award winner. So I got an equally good player, but a much more solid character by doing my chess move, but you got to be willing to see if you can make that challenging player turn into a good player, and you’re gonna have some highs and lows with that, and you’re gonna have some challenging moments. Most teams and organizations aren’t willing to commit that kind of energy to do that. But if you’re able to do that, you then take nothing, and you turn it into an All-Star, great character guy like Steve Smith. So there’s a lot to do in this GM job. And there’s a lot of different ways to do it. But I always do my homework, I always have a reason for what we’re doing. Obviously, not everything works out perfectly, but you have a game and a goal. And sometimes another move in mind when you’re making the current move.
I know you talk about it in your book, but can you talk a bit on how you managed to facilitate the trade for Scottie Pippen to Portland?
BW: Well, that was a fun one. Obviously, we’re all working under a salary cap and we had a really good team in Portland. I think we made it to the Conference Finals, but we still had a few rough spots and a few characters. [Scottie] Pippen wanted out of Houston because [Hakeem] Olajuwon, [Charles] Barkley, and Pippen wasn’t working. And Scottie wanted out.
The Lakers wanted him and he wanted to go to the Lakers. And that made sense. They had a great team in LA. Scottie had played for Phil [Jackson]. But I wanted to get in on it. I thought Scottie would be perfect for us. So, I got a hold of Houston and they said Scottie only wants to go to LA. It’s kind of like today, it’s hard to get a superstar who doesn’t want to be with you. But I said, “Well, let me talk to Scottie.” So they let me talk to his agent and his agent said Scottie has no interest in going to Portland. His wife has no interest in going to Portland. She wants to be in LA. She wants to get into movies and television and different things. They liked the market. They liked the weather. It rains in Portland.
And the agent was Jimmy Sexton and I said, “Well, let me talk to Scottie.” Scottie is going to tell you the same thing. So I got to talk to Scottie and he started out with the same pitch. And then I told Scottie, “Let me give you my pitch.” And I did and he knew I built a great team in Seattle. He knew our Portland team was really good because we’ve just been in the Conference Finals. I kind of walked him through my vision, which was Scottie in LA you’ll be No. 3 behind Shaq and Kobe. In Portland, you’ll be our guy. You’ll be the leader. If you can win a championship in Portland, you can win one without Phil, you can win one without Michael [Jordan]. We have a better team. We’re deeper. We’re more athletic. Our style fits in better. We can monitor your minutes a little better and you’ll be the leader. Yeah, Portland’s a great community, great owner, I went through the pitch.
When I got done with it Scottie. Scottie says, okay, well, I still want to go to LA but I won’t veto Portland, I’m happy to go to Portland. And then that gave me the opportunity to put Houston under the gun a little bit. I put together my package, which included a lot of players for salary cap reasons, not a great deal for them. But it was a hard deal to make because Scottie had a big salary. And I gave them a quick clock. I said, if you don’t do it by a time certain, I think it might have been a 12-hour deadline or something, I really put them on a quick clock. I said, I’m gonna go public and say we’re out of it. And then when your market and Scottie knows that you lost a solid deal in Portland, you better be able to put a deal together with the Lakers then if you can’t, you’ve got the disgruntled guy with your other two disgruntled superstars. And you don’t have a deal with the Lakers right now, you’re still trying to cobble one together. So they took our deal because ours was a sure thing.
It's interesting that you just talked about a star player wanted to go to another team, and you managed to get him to come to your team in Portland. Right now, we have the situation going on with Damian Lillard wanting to go to Miami. How would you approach this situation if you were the GM or an advisor to the Blazers?
BW: Well, I will just tell you, I’ve already done it. I was the GM of the Blazers. My first week on the job Clyde Drexler demanded a trade. Now the difference was Clyde didn’t say he only wanted to go to one team. I told Clyde, come on in and play. I’m committed to trading you. And Clyde really wanted to go somewhere where he could get another extension on his contract. I said to Clyde, my preference is to try to find a team where you can win a championship. And believe me, you may disagree with me now, but 20 years from now, if you have a ring on your finger, you’re gonna be very, very happy. And if you help a team win a championship, nine times out of 10 you’re gonna get that contract extension you’re looking for because you’re part of a championship team.
But he wanted out immediately, and he wasn’t going to come to camp, and I talked him into coming to camp. Then he wasn’t going to get on the plane with us to fly to Japan because we had our first two games in Japan that year. And I talked him into doing that. Then he was gonna hold out after the first month. I said, “Fine, I know what I’m doing. I just need you to keep playing well and not grumbling. The trade deadline is on February, I’ll get something done before then. But the best thing you can do is just play well. You don’t know what teams are watching but they want to see Clyde Drexler being Clyde Drexler.” And at the end of the day, I had a certain agenda that I was trying to accomplish but I wanted to get the best deal for the Blazers, and one that I felt worked for Clyde.
If I was doing Dame Lillard today, my No. 1 goal would be to get the best deal for the Blazers. You’ve got to get the best thing for the franchise, but I would hope I could get multiple deals that I liked. And then if I was able to do that, I’d bring Dame in and I’d say, you know, here’s the deal. So I could send you here or there or somewhere else. And as long as there were deals that I liked for my franchise out of respect to them. We’re trying to get his preference on which deal he liked. I did a similar thing in Seattle when I traded Jack Sikma. I had multiple deals, but they were all to cities or teams he wanted to go to and once I told him I was able to do a deal to one of the teams he wanted to go to he was fine.
So, I think you do owe your iconic player if you have one, respect, but you need to do what’s right for the franchise first. So that would be the way I would handle the situation.
Only the person in that chair can make that determination. But you also need to know what’s out there, what really could be out there, and what isn’t out there. You have to determine the timing of when to do a deal. What you can’t afford to do is, let your best deal evaporate, and then no better deal comes along. Because you can’t just sit there and think by doing nothing, better and better deals are gonna come along. It’s like Pippen or any of these other deals, you’ve got to be right in there, working it. That’s sort of the nuance of being a GM, is really knowing the market, knowing the other rosters, knowing the salary cap, knowing the age of the players involved, all the various things. It’s not an easy thing, but you have to know when to pull the trigger and when not to pull the trigger. So I’ll be curious, like everybody to see if and when they do something and what it turns out to be.
Back when you were with the Sonics, drafting players who didn't play college was unpopular. What was the process like to draft Shawn Kemp?
BW: It was a difficult draft because there hadn’t been a player for probably around 14 years that came away from high school to the NBA. I remember dealing with Red Auerbach a little bit as a young, upcoming executive and watching Red because at the time, he was the most successful GM in the league. Red had missed on a lot of draft picks, and he missed on a lot of trades. Okay, we all do that, but what Red was fantastic at was hitting grand slams.
He took a draft pick and parlayed it into Robert Parish and Kevin McHale, and it turned out to be Joe Barry Carroll. Or he drafted a guy that was never going to play in the NBA because he was playing major league baseball in Toronto, Danny Ainge, or he drafted a junior eligible player, which was a rule that hasn’t been around forever, a guy named Larry Bird and he waited a year.
So every time Red would do one of these hit-or-miss deals, and they panned out, they would be the cornerstones to a championship-caliber team. And I always thought, when I got in the GM’s chair, if I saw one of those opportunities, I was gonna take it. And if I struck out, I’d get fired, but I never have a regret. So when I saw Shawn Kemp, who had not played in college, he went to Kentucky and had some issues there and then transfer that semester to Trinity Valley Junior College in Texas and couldn’t play there. So he had been out of high school for a year and hadn’t played a second of college basketball.
When I got to see him play. I thought, wow, this guy is declaring for the draft, honestly… The phrase I used with the coaches, the owner with everybody was he’s a combination of Charles Barkley and Dominique Wilkins. In my mind, he has the power, the physical maturity of Charles, but he had the explosiveness and the jumping and the leaping ability of Dominique. Yet, if it came together, he’d be his own guy.
So the coaches got on board with me because I had two first-round picks and all they wanted was a point guard and we agreed that Dana Barros would be our guy. It was a good point guard draft. And so they were fine with whatever I did with the second pick. But the real problem was, I couldn’t convince the owner to let me take a guy that he’d never heard of, that our fans would not know, the media never heard of, he wouldn’t sell tickets. He repeatedly told me no, no, no. And then he finally got to, I don’t want you to take him, I’m not gonna tell you no, but I don’t want you to take him. Then the phrase which you never need to hear, but it’s always applied, if it doesn’t work out, I’m going to fire you.
So I took him and you know, Shawn Kemp made me look good, because Shawn Kemp became a pretty good player pretty fast. And Shawn’s success really is what opened the door for future high school to college guys. We had a lot of great ones, Kobe, Kevin Garnett, later on LeBron. Kobe wasn’t great when he first came in, it took him a few years. People forget that. But Kobe was one of the all-time greats. And I’m not sure those guys would have been coming right into the pros had Shawn not had success. If Shawn had failed, probably a lot of those guys would have gone to college for one or two years before coming into the NBA. So you need somebody to pave the way.
Shawn paved the way and really the next year, I drafted Gary Payton. And that became the foundation or the cornerstone of the great Sonics team in the mid 90s. And their style, the way they play, the way we wanted to play, it was it was the perfect fit. But it took a few years for them to grow and mature and get to where they were but it was a high risk.
What has changed with managing in today’s league compared to when you were GM?
BW: I don’t think you can get guys on the court today who are not legitimate basketball players, and have some ability to shoot the ball, where years ago, you could have guys on the court, or at least one who really didn’t know how to play basketball, but they can be physical and they can rebound and do some of those things. So that would be one thing.
Another thing that was just recently addressed by the Board of Governors and Adam Silver, but just barely addressed and I think it needs to continue to go further… But this whole concept of load management in the last four, five, six years, I used to have players that would come into my office every day because they only got to play 35 minutes a night instead of 40, and they play 80 games, 82 games, 76 games. I had guys you know our practices were brutal because everybody wanted minutes. Now you have guys that play back-to-back and they’re like whoa, I’m not going to go back-to-back.
I think the money is better, bigger, which is fantastic. The style of play, probably more running but less physical. But you need to create the environment where players should want to play, they should want to be the best. Now you’ve got to play 65 games to be an All-Star, you’ve got some little markers. You want players that really want to compete. I get it if you’ve played 20 years, you may need some time off here and there. We’ve done that in the past too. But we would usually do it by not making the guys practice during the season. We’d let them do some light shooting and some other things. But that’s what off days are for. So they will be ready to play. And I think it’s a disservice to the fans. You buy four tickets in October for a game in December to take your family to see a particular superstar. And if he’s injured, no problem, everybody understands that. But he just wants to rest tonight because it will be his third game in four nights, that’s just unacceptable in my view.
So I’m glad it’s starting to be addressed. And I think a lot of players actually would like to play more. I think sometimes it’s initiated by the analytics of the teams, just because sometimes I think they want to outsmart everybody. Getting home-court advantage and getting the proper seats in the playoffs is a huge thing if you want to win a championship. So I always believe, put the pedal down and try to have the best regular season. Be smart, don’t burn guys out. And if they’re hurt, don’t play them.
And then the third piece I would think is management is becoming more and more important, not just from a salary cap, now that we have a second apron moving forward, the dollars are so big, when you make mistakes on these players, and you’re tied into these big contracts, you’re done, it’s over. So you’ve got to really draft well. And there’s still a lot of mistakes being made in the drafts, and I’m not sure why. And you got to be able to develop players well, and you better be good at making your trades and knowing who you want to trade, why and trade them before it’s too late. So I think I think the management piece of the puzzle is gonna be more and more important moving forward. And you’ve got to have the right management staff and team of people in place because you can’t get out of the mistake if you’re going to be paying the guy $50, $60 million a year for the next three, four or five years. Even if he’s a good player, he may be untradable.
The league continues to evolve. It’s fantastic. I love it. I love the evolution. Players continue to get better and better. It’s a great game to watch. But it should continue to improve and get better, and I think it will.
Why did you decide to write this book?
BW: Well, I think if you go back, when you’re working hard, you don’t really think about it. But at one time, I was president and general manager of the Portland Trail Blazers, and at the same time, I was president of the Seattle Seahawks, as well as president of a bunch of other companies that Paul Allen owned, and you don’t realize all the things you’re doing and all the stories that are developing, and you don’t really have time to process them. But it’s a lot. And over the years, whether I’m giving speeches, or I’m lecturing at classes or just at dinner parties, I can’t tell you how many times people are asking me stories about their favorite Sonics player, or their signings team or their Trail Blazers team, or, did we get screwed in 2000, when Kobe [Bryant] and Shaq [O’Neal] suddenly got about 20 more free throws in second half of Game 7.
But anyway, there’s just a lot of history and a lot of stories. When I wrote Game Changer, I wanted to kind of address a lot of the stories, a lot of the questions. But I also wanted to give the fans sort of the questions they wanted to answer to.
I get asked all the time, what does the general manager do? There’s a title of general manager, and then there’s job responsibilities. So I tried to address that in the book. How do you make a trade? I mean, everybody thinks you just call up a GM and say, you want this guy for that guy? Well, that’s never happened to me. But there’s a lot of different ways, and they all take on a life of their own. I would call it kind of a behind-the-scenes, a little bit of really what goes on in the front office. Some of the you-can’t-believe-it moments. And I also gave examples on various player contract negotiations or player trades I made where I used each of those examples. I thought it would be a good way to show young and up-and-coming executives, there was a lot of different techniques you can use in any circumstance. So I didn’t think it would take so long. It was a fun project. It turned out to be a lot more work than I thought, but I’m really glad I did it. And it turned out well.
It's been reported that Seattle and Las Vegas are top contenders as expansion teams for the NBA. Given your experience in Seattle as GM, what can you tell people on what it was like to have an NBA team in the Emerald City?
BW: Seattle is a wonderful market and in my view, they should never have lost the franchise. I was part of moving a team from Kansas City to Sacramento. And I can tell you Kansas City never really supported the team. The Sonics were really supportive very, very well and it’s a great market. And I can tell you on a personal level, I’m committed to being a part of bringing an NBA team back to Seattle.
I use the phrase when I write in my book about the possibility of bringing an expansion team back to Seattle, I used to talk about if the NBA would expand and if Seattle might be eligible to get a team. Now I only talk in terms of when the NBA expands. And there’s no question in my mind we’ll be able to put together the right kind of ownership group, the right kind of bid, the right kind of fan support, and all the things required.
So all we need is the NBA to say they’re willing and wanting to expand, and I believe the Seattle market will be at the top of the list. It will be a phenomenal market. I believe the team will be super well-supported. Bringing the signings back is something that fans have wanted since 2008. I live in Seattle, I hear it every day, I’m asked the question every day. And all I can tell them is yes, I’m 100 percent all in and I’m gonna do everything I can, in a big way or even in a small way, whatever is required to help make that happen.
I heard that when Climate Pledge Arena was remodeled, they already have an NBA ready locker room ready to go there. So if an expansion team does come in, it will all be ready to go. Are you familiar with this?
BW: I know that firsthand. I was hired as a consultant to help design Climate Pledge Arena. And when I met with David Bonderman, who was the lead owner and I was asked to come on board and help, I said to David, I really only have one question. I’m all in to help on the hockey expansion and get the arena built, but are you committed to making sure the building is NBA ready, and he said, that’s your job as a consultant. Your job is to make sure that the NBA will say this is a perfect facility for the NBA. And if you see anything being done in the design, and construction of this arena, that would prevent Seattle from getting an NBA team, your job is to come to me, yell, scream, stop the presses, and we’ll make sure it gets done.
And I will tell you, everybody working on the facility was 100 percent committed to making sure that if and when the NBA expanded, it would meet all the specs. There was a preseason game at Climate Pledge last year. There’s one coming up this year on October 10 which is the same day my book is publishing. The NBA has been out here, so I can tell you the one thing Seattle did not have was an NBA-ready facility. Well, that problem was solved a few years ago. So the one hurdle keeping Seattle out of the NBA has been cleared. Climate Pledge is NBA ready, and the NBA has been out here that if they require anything else, and I don’t believe they will, but if they did, I will tell you the commitment would be there to make any minor changes they wanted done to the facility, they would be done instantly. So not a problem.
