City of Seattle

Seattle venture capital investor, Chris Hansen, who headed the group looking to purchase the Kings and move them to Seattle, was caught donating $100K to the Anti-Kings-Arena group, STOP, which had previously been linked to former Kings owners the Maloofs.  Hansen was contrite after the connection surfaced, offering an apology to the people of Sacramento for his underhanded effort to ruin their new arena deal and help facilitate a move to his hometown.

But Scott Howard-Cooper of NBA.com opines that Hansen's back-handed donation hurts Seattle more than it might have hurt Sacramento.  Howard-Cooper argues that Hansen owes an apology to the people of Seattle more so than the one he gave Sacramento on Friday.

Seattle still remains a city without a basketball team after Clay Bennett moved the Seattle Supersonics to Oklahoma City in the summer of 2008 ostensibly after the city voted against publicly funding a new stadium. Hansen's actions have drawn the ire of the NBA, and Howard-Cooper says it has created another obstacle in the path of professional basketball's return to rainy Seattle. 

Howard-Cooper adds, via Twitter, that Hansen's public scolding is a nice cherry on top for Sacramento since the league approved the sale of the team to a Sacramento-group led by Vivek Ranadive. He wonders why Hansen donated the money when he had to be aware it would eventually be made public (Twitter). But he also cautions, with a tweet, that this sort of corporate sabotage happens all the time when this much money is at stake; it just usually goes unreported.    

7:50pm: Hansen has issued a statement saying that he made a mistake in donating to STOP, and won't contribute further funding to any anti-arena efforts. Hansen added that the decision was his alone, and wasn't made on behalf of his potential Seattle ownership group. Tony Bizjak has the details in a series of tweets.

6:06pm: The FPPC has confirmed that Hansen was behind the donation to STOP, according to Bruski (via Twitter). There's no evidence that the Maloofs had any involvement, according to the FPPC's Gar Winuk (Twitter link via Kasler).

Hansen actually donated $100K to the anti-arena effort, rather than the $80K previously reported, according to Steve Large of CBS Sacramento (Twitter links). The Bee's report has been updated with that $100K figure as well.

5:40pm: A report last week revealed that a law firm which had previously represented the Maloof family had provided funding to an ongoing petition effort against a new Sacramento arena. However, it wasn't the Maloofs who were behind the $80K in funding from the firm of Loeb & Loeb. According to Carmichael Dave of KHTK 1140 (via Twitter) and Tony Bizjak and Dale Kasler of the Sacramento Bee, Seattle investor Chris Hansen was the mystery donor.

According to the Sacramento Bee's report, Hansen made the $80K donation to the anti-arena effort about a month after the NBA elected to keep the Kings franchise in Sacramento rather than sell it to Hansen's Seattle-based group. The donation was made to a group known as STOP (Sacramento Taxpayers Opposed to Pork), which has attempted to gather signatures for a petition demanding a public vote on the proposed Sacramento arena.

The reports of Hansen's involvement in the donation come shortly after a lawsuit was filed by California's FPPC (Fair Political Practices Commission) against Loeb & Loeb, demanding to know the identity of the donor. The contributor should have been disclosed last month, but wasn't, according to the Bee report.

The secretive $80K donation to STOP may have hurt the group's efforts as much as it helped, with the Bee noting that two political consultants quit the petition campaign last week, saying they were "taken aback by the secrecy surrounding the donation." Additionally, city officials say that about 1,700 people who initially signed the petition now want to have their names removed. STOP must accumulate 22,000 signatures by December in order to put the issue on Sacramento's ballot for next June.

Aaron Bruski of Pro Basketball Talk (Twitter link) hears from a league source that if the allegations against Hansen turn out to be true, they won't be viewed favorably by the NBA. In his public comments following the league's decision on the Kings, Hansen was contrite about playing the role of a "predator," attempting to relocate another city's team.

The head of a company that organizes grassroots political campaigns claims that the law firm that represented the Maloof family, former owners of the Kings, provided $80K to fund an ongoing petition effort against a new arena in Sacramento, report Ryan Lillis, Tony Bizjak and Dale Kasler of The Sacramento Bee. The league has set deadlines for the Kings and the city to progress toward a new building, with the threat that the NBA could take the club away from the new ownership of Vivek Ranadive and company, and perhaps move the Kings to another city.

Paul Olson, the head of Olson Campaigns, said today in a statement that the firm of Loeb & Loeb funneled the money through a political consultant based in Orange County, California. Loeb & Loeb represented the Maloofs when they were attempting to sell the team earlier this year to Chris Hansen, Steve Ballmer, and other investors who wanted to move the Kings to Seattle.

Olson said his company has severed ties with the petition effort, which is attempting to force a public vote on city funding for the arena project. George Maloof denies any connection between his family and the petition drive.

"I know nothing about it. Zero," he said. "I just called them (Loeb & Loeb), just now. This is the first I heard of it. They said it was for another client."

The California Fair Political Practices commission is investigating the funding of the petition effort, in response to allegations that the funding is not being properly reported to state elections officials. California Secretary of State records show that Loeb & Loeb have reported no expenditures on the signature drive.

The NBA has the right to arrange for sale to another ownership group and move the Kings out of Sacramento if the team isn't playing in a new arena by 2017, Dale Kasler, Tony Bizjak and Ryan Lillis of The Sacramento Bee report. Vivek Ranadive and his partners, who officially assumed control of the team earlier today, have said they can have a new arena in place by 2016, but commissioner David Stern insisted the Ranadive group agree in writing to the deadline based on his misgivings about "very rosy predictions by both Seattle and Sacramento about the ease with which this building could take place."

Ranadive's spokesman said the owners are "absolutely confident" about their ability to deliver the arena on time. The league will force the Kings to meet several other benchmarks in the process of building the arena as well, including the completion of environmental reviews. If the team misses any of these deadlines, the league can engineer the team's move to another city. The group of Seattle investors that was competing to buy the team from the Maloof family agreed to a similar set of deadlines with the league.

The new Kings owners have plans for a $448MM downtown arena. The city will provide $258MM worth of funding, though that contribution could be subject to a public vote if an opposition group's petition drive is successful.

Ranadive and company own 65% of the team, and will soon own 72%, as Kasler reports. Ranadive is purchasing a 7% share that's being held in bankruptcy. Chris Hansen, the leader of the Seattle bidders, has canceled his deal to assume that share. Ranadive's $15MM price for the share is the same amount as Hansen's offer.

Chris Hansen may not have been the big money behind the bid purchase the Kings and move them to Seattle, but he was unquestionably the face of the movement.  Hansen has been largely silent since his group was shot down by the NBA Board of Governors but earlier today he gave a lengthy interview to Dave Mahler of KJR Radio.  We've got all the highlights courtesy of NBCSports.com's Aaron Bruski with all links going to Twitter..

• While there has been speculation about other clubs that Hansen's group could zero in on, he says that they won't be going after another city's team as a "predator" again.  "If we'd known that there would have been such strong support to keep the team in SAC, we'd have approached it differently," said Hansen (link).  That would seem to imply that the Sonics will wait for an expansion opportunity to come their way, but that may not be anytime soon.  Seattle could also wait for a club to already get the OK to move before pursuing them.
• Hansen didn't expect this level of backlash when it came to the Kings, saying that there was a belief inside and outside of the NBA that they were going to move (link).  Before agreeing to purchase a team next time around, Hansen's group will make sure that they have gained pre-approval to move (link).
• David Stern isn't the most popular guy in the Seattle area, but Hansen doesn't believe that the commissioner has anything against the city (link).
• The investor says that he has never sued anybody and doesn't plan to start with the NBA.
• However, the group would like to recoup the non-refundable $30MM deposit that they gave to the Maloofs.  But, again, they won't be suing. (Twitter links).
• When the NBA negotiates its next TV contract, Hansen believes that the league will be reminded of how valuable Seattle really is.

TUESDAY, 2:12pm: Dale Kasler of the Sacramento Bee (Twitter link) hears that the finance committee will vote on the sale of the Kings early this week, with an official vote by the full Board of Governors coming before the end of May.

MONDAY, 1:45pm: Ranadive doesn't formally own the NBA team yet, tweets Ryan Lillis of The Sacramento Bee, pointing out that the team will move forward with the Maloofs' plan to send coach Keith Smart to the draft lottery. Windhorst has deleted his tweet from yesterday, so perhaps Johnson jumped the gun in saying that Ranadive had assumed control of the franchise. In any case, Ranadive and company remain on track to take over the Kings.

SUNDAY, 1:33pm: Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson says NBA owners have approved the sale of the Kings to the Sacramento-based group headed by Vivek Ranadive, tweets Brian Windhorst of ESPN.com. The league had been expected to make a formal announcement of the deal between the Maloof family and Ranadive's group this week, although it was thought that escrow would not close until the end of the month. In any case, Ranadive now has control of the franchise, according to Johnson.

There's usually a much longer gap between the time an agreement on a sale is reached and the point when the purchase becomes official. Last year, Robert Pera agreed to buy the Grizzlies in June, but didn't take control of the team until October 31st. An official announcement from the league has yet to come, but it's not entirely surprising the process was expedited this time around, since the league had a chance to thoroughly vet Ranadive's bid as it sorted out whether to allow the Kings to move to Seattle. 

Johnson said earlier this week that the agreement had been "signed on both ends" and that the "money has been wired," so it looked like the green light from the league was the last step in the process. Ranadive was a relative late-comer in an effort that began in earnest in January, around the time the Maloofs reached a deal to sell the team to Seattle investor Chris Hansen and his partners. Johnson spearheaded the effort to put the group together, combining $1MM commitments from 20 Sacramento-area locals with the larger financial backing of deep-pocketed "whales," including Mark Mastrov and Ron Burkle. Mastrov became the lead investor, but Burkle, an enemy of the Maloofs, proved a stumbling block, and as he faded from the picture, Ranadive took over the primary reigns of the bid.

The Sacramento group's final purchase price for the Kings is based on a full valuation of the team at $535MM, an NBA record and $10MM greater than Hansen's initial offer. The Maloofs' share is 65%, so that works out to a $347.75MM sum that's changing hands. Hansen and company upped their valuation of the club to $625MM, but ultimately lost out, spending more than $100MM on an ill-fated effort to buy the team.