Sonics owner tells NBA he wants to move team to Oklahoma City

[KSig RC]

Originally Posted by TexasWSP

Unless it's just not publicized when an owner wants a new stadium, I'm not sure I can agree.

There have been plenty of brand new facilities built in all three major sports over the past 5-10 years that I can think of off the top of my head...and I'm not hearing anything about owners wanting an upgrade from any of them.

I will be willing to bet Jerry Jones, for instance, isn't going to be asking for another new stadium in five years after the completion of, most likely, the most luxurious and sophisticated place to watch a sporting event you can get. I can't imagine Cuban asking for a new place for the Mavs to play basketball in anytime soon either. American Airlines is as good as it gets. These are only a couple of examples, but still....

Also, I'm not really seeing many big changes in general seating to luxury box seats and I go to a lot of sporting events in many different places.

Jerry Jones is a very prominent exception to the rule, as is Cuban - that I'll agree. The fact that they both operate out of Dallas is pretty much luck (for the people of Dallas), and not indicative of the larger trend.

Baseball stadiums are the best examples of the new trend toward smaller stadiums with more luxury seating - PNC in Pittsburgh, for instance, dropped about 10,000 total seats from Three Rivers, but with a much higher concentration of high-dollar, high-revenue luxury boxes. Similar things are happening in the NBA.

Football stadiums don't exactly follow the pattern, mostly because the comparably fewer games played by each team leads to a lot more sellouts (and larger capacity is valued there, mostly to appease population demand). However, luxury seating is still at a premium - the main reason for obsoleting the old Foxboro Stadium so the Pats could build Gillette was that it lacked any sort of premium seating.

The main issue isn't getting rid of regular seats completely, it's a redesign of seating to maximize revenue from luxury boxes. You have to sell a crapload of $19 seats to garner the same revenue as one corporate box.