Sale of Kings forces NBA to choose between heart and head

Instead of calling for a vote on the future of the Kings at the board of governors meeting April 18-19, Stern warned of a delay on a final decision in order to give owners more time to analyze the choice between moving the team to Seattle and keeping it in Sacramento.

Sacramento has been scrambling to assemble an ownership group and arena strategy that can compete with Seattle, which has been developing its plan for more than two years.

A franchise in Seattle would pay into the NBA’s new revenue-sharing plan, while Sacramento would be receiving bailouts from revenue-sharing.

The economy of Seattle is growing, while Sacramento’s is shrinking — and media rights for an NBA franchise in Seattle would be almost double the rights fees earned by Sacramento.

The Seattle group laid out the recent history of arena building projects in the Sacramento region for NBA owners.

Hansen’s group told NBA owners that Seattle has 13 companies rated in the Fortune 1000; Sacramento has none.

The Seattle group told owners that Sacramento’s fall has been structural rather than cyclical, based on Sacramento’s emphasis on residential home construction leading up to the recent housing crisis.

Seattle’s presentation to NBA owners emphasized that six rival major sports franchises operate in the Bay Area with 90 miles of Sacramento.

“I think their whole business plan is flawed — that the real estate numbers don’t work, that they don’t have enough money to make any of it happen,” the owner said of Sacramento group’s proposal to buy the Kings and prevent them from moving to Seattle.

At the same time, the expensive gesture shows that the Seattle partners would come to the NBA with deeper pockets than the recently-assembled group in Sacramento, which had yet to formally match the previous valuation of $525 million.