Seattle now has a second group trying to buy its way back into the NBA, and this one arrives with the most unusual pitch in the entire expansion conversation.
BlackSun Private Equity, a New York-based firm, submitted a bid in August for an NBA expansion team in Seattle. The headline is not the money. It is the partner and the location.
BlackSun is working with the Tulalip Tribes to build an arena on tribal-owned land in Marysville, Washington, roughly 35 miles from Seattle. Nick Rathod, BlackSun’s chief global strategy and communications officer, told The Athletic that the two sides are “100 percent partnering.” The plan is not just a building. It includes what the group calls an entertainment district around it.
Let me be blunt about the obvious objection first. Thirty-five miles is a long way from downtown Seattle. NBA teams live and die on weeknight attendance, and weeknight attendance lives and dies on how annoying the trip is. Any bid that asks a fan base to drive north on a Tuesday in February is starting with a real problem, and pretending otherwise would be silly.
BlackSun clearly knows this, because the plan includes a bridge. Under the proposal, the team would initially play as a tenant at Climate Pledge Arena while the permanent complex gets built. That is a smart sequencing move. It puts the team in the city on day one, in a building that already exists and already works, and buys years to get the Marysville project right.
The financial claim is aggressive. BlackSun CEO Atonn Muhammad told the Seattle Times that the group can bring on enough investors to support a bid worth up to $8.1 billion. That is a number designed to end the conversation about whether this group is serious, and it will be tested. Announced intent to assemble investors is not the same as assembled investors, and the NBA will care a great deal about that difference.
The part of this bid I find most compelling has nothing to do with the money. BlackSun has also announced Native World Sports as a partner, a group whose stated goal is advancing tribal participation in professional sports and entertainment. Tribal ownership stakes and tribal-land venues are not a common feature of major American pro sports. A franchise built that way would be a first of real substance, not a marketing line.
So how should the league weigh this? The competing consideration is straightforward. An expansion team in Seattle is one of the safest bets in American sports because the market never stopped wanting it. The NBA does not need to take on geographic risk to make that work. It could simply pick the bid that puts the arena where the people are.
But the flip side is that Climate Pledge Arena already has tenants and a calendar, and a long-term home the team actually controls has enormous value. BlackSun is offering exactly that, plus land access that a downtown project would spend a decade and a fortune fighting for.
My read: the Marysville site is the weakness and the Tulalip partnership is the strength, and the Climate Pledge bridge is what keeps the whole thing viable. If BlackSun can prove the $8.1 billion is real rather than aspirational, this becomes a serious bid rather than an interesting one.
Seattle deserves a team. It now has two groups arguing about how to deliver it, which is a much better problem than the one the city has had since the Sonics left.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
