Rose Garden's name goes on auction block
Posted by The Oregonian December 12, 2007 22:41PM
Portland: Prepare to have your Rose Garden plucked.
Paul Allen's Vulcan Inc., which owns both the Portland Trail Blazers and the Rose Garden Arena, said Wednesday it will sell the rights to name Portland's largest entertainment venue.
That means the Blazers could play their home games in an arena named as blandly as Key Arena in Seattle or as omnipresent as Oracle Arena in Oakland, home to the Golden State Warriors. Or EnergySolutions Arena in Salt Lake City, named after a company that disposes of nuclear waste.
It's even possible the name Rose Garden -- reflecting the city's moniker -- will disappear from the side of the building, team president Larry Miller said.
"We'll figure that out once we determine who the partner is," Miller said.
The deal could be worth several million dollars a year of additional revenue for the Blazers, based on reports of other stadium naming deals in markets of similar size to Portland.
And the Blazers could use the extra cash. Forbes magazine this month estimated the Trail Blazers took a $25 million operating loss last season on revenues of $82 million -- the second highest loss and the second-lowest revenues in the league. The Blazers dispute the numbers, but not the rankings.
Tod Leiweke, chief executive of Vulcan Sports & Entertainment, said the team would be selective in choosing the right naming partner. He said escalating team salaries and repeated financial losses mean the team needs to look for new revenue streams to field a competitive team.
"Virtually every building in the NBA has a corporate naming partner," Leiweke said. "Not having one puts us at a disadvantage off the court."
According to NBA spokesman Chris Wallace, only six of 30 NBA teams play in buildings without naming rights, though three of them -- New Orleans, Milwaukie and Charlotte -- are so-called small-market teams like Portland. Miller said Charlotte is pursuing a naming-rights deal.
Team officials say they are already in talks with Portland-area companies, as well as regional and national firms, though they declined to name any. They hope to brand a new name on the 12-year-old arena by the start of next season.
"Definitely we think the timing is right for this," Miller said.
It wasn't right just a year ago, according to a former spokesman for Portland Arena Management, which then owned the building. The group of creditors, which bought the arena from Paul Allen in 2004 out of bankruptcy, considered selling naming rights to the venue. But it eventually dropped the idea, in part because of the team's on- and off-the-court performance, said former group board member Richard Josephson.
"We looked at all revenue options," Josephson said. "We certainly considered whether the time was right for trying to do a naming rights deal. We had just gotten the building out of bankruptcy, and the club was in the tank."
Times, obviously, have changed. The team won the top draft pick this year and fields a team that, so far this season, has avoided off-court troubles of teams past.
A spokesman for Wells Fargo Bank, a key corporate sponsor of the team, said the bank will hear the team's pitch.
"We're going to listen to their proposal and go from there," bank spokesman Tom Unger said. "The upside would be it's the highest profile public sporting facility in the region. There's definite benefit from it. The question would be whether it's affordable for us, given what else we're doing."
Unger declined to reveal the terms of the bank's current five-year sponsorship, signed in 2005, but said it's worth "seven figures" to the team.
A spokesman with Nike, the state's only Fortune 500 company, declined comment.
When the arena opened in 1995, then-team chief executive Marshall Glickman decided against selling the arena's naming rights.
"It just didn't seem like the Portland thing to do," the Portland native said at the time.
Today, Glickman said, selling the Rose Garden's naming rights is "the fiscally responsible thing to do."
"This is 12 years later," said Glickman, who owns G2 Strategic, a sports business consulting firm in Bend. "The economic pressure is a different story. Back then we were making a lot of money. Today's reality is different than that, and payroll was a small fraction of what it is today. I don't blame them for doing it."
Brent Hunsberger: 503-221-8359; brenthunsberger@news.oregonian.com, www.oregonlive.com/weblogs/atwork
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exactly.
Thanks to google earth i even know what this is. They are everywhere you look in PDX.
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