If at first you don’t succeed Mr. Hansen….
You have to admire Chris Hansen’s dedication to his goal. Building a Seattle arena and getting a Seattle National Basketball Association franchise although it appears Hansen is on a fool’s errand. There have been a number of road blocks that Hansen has not been able to overcome in his more than six-year trek to get an NBA team in Seattle. Hansen failed to buy the Sacramento Kings and move the team from California’s capital to the Pacific Northwest. He struck out in his attempt to build an arena near Seattle’s adjacent baseball and football stadiums in 2016 in an area choked with traffic which is one of the reasons Hansen’s plan was rejected. He has seen the Oak View Group win the right to rebuild the Seattle Center Arena and watched as the National Hockey League expanded into the city. Hansen apparently would have made his building available to the NHL. He has heard that the NBA has no plan to expand the league’s number of teams in the near future. But Hansen is continuing to turn over every rock in his Don Quixote attempt to reach for the unreachable star. The latest, Hansen and the King County NAACP met recently to discuss how to proceed with Hansen’s Seattle arena plan.
Hansen’s new thinking is the NBA will come if he builds an arena because an NBA team could not share the renovated Seattle Center Arena with an NHL expansion team. Why? There might not be enough revenue in one building for an NBA and NHL team although there are NBA-NHL shared facilities in many North American cities. Seattle has the best corporate market of all the available American cities without an NBA team and it has a good TV market. But nothing is happening. Hansen will continue his quest but he might be tilting at windmills.
