Tom Dundon Cares Not One Bit About The Portland Trail Blazers

It takes a special kind of creep to stand out for sleaziness among NBA owners, objectively one of the worst demographics our species has ever established. Tom Dundon has been the official majority owner of the Portland Trail Blazers for less than three months, and already he is a standard-bearer. It’s clear he doesn’t mind being a villain. Having already downsized the organization with layoffs, pinched on travel accommodations, stiffed his team’s two-way players, and cheaped-out on playoff t-shirts, Dundon is now engaged in brinkmanship with the city of Portland over funding for arena renovations. Even that description is too generous: Dundon told an assembly of Portland businesspeople Wednesday night that he intends to pay a whopping zero dollars of his own money toward a $600 million project.

The Blazers play in one of the league’s older buildings. The arena opened in 1995 and was built using, in part, debt financing. Then-Blazers owner Paul Allen refused to back the debt with his own vast personal wealth; in a sort of grimly hilarious coincidence, given that Dundon made his fortune as a subprime lender, this subjected the project to shitty, expensive loan terms, an arrangement that kerploded after a decade and led to the arena being forfeited to its creditors at the bleak end of a 2004 bankruptcy. The building was operated by Portland Arena Management, an entity spun up by the lenders that now owned it, until Allen eventually re-purchased it, in 2007. In 2024, the arena was sold to the city of Portland for the startlingly low price of just $7 million. Perhaps it’s cursed. In any case, the arena is now publicly owned, and the Blazers lease it from the city.

The Blazers want the building upgraded, but their new owner, who considers printing and distributing t-shirts for a home playoff game to be an unreasonable extravagance, does not believe that this work should deprive him of any portion of his outrageous and ill-begotten private fortune. The way Dundon describes it, his team is already contributing enough to the pot. The city maintains a Spectator Venues & Visitor Activities Fund, which is funded in part by fees and taxes collected at city-owned venues, including on tickets to Blazers games. A portion of the city’s burden of renovation costs would come from this fund. Voilà, says Dundon: Because the Blazers collect these fees and pass them through to the city, they are already paying their fair share. It’s absurd and disingenuous on its face, but you really have to hear it in Dundon’s own words to appreciate the leverage he is attempting to gain.