The fact finding may have started.
There are reports out of Boston that the ownership group of the National Basketball Association’s Boston Celtics franchise is looking around the city and the suburbs for land to build a basketball centric venue. The lease between the owners of the Boston arena and the Celtics ownership group to use the venue ends in 2036. That might be a decade away but getting sports venues built in Boston is very difficult. Just ask the owner of the National Football League’s New England Patriots franchise and Major League Soccer’s New England Revolution franchise, Robert Kraft, about his path finding land outside of Boston to build an arena for his soccer business. It took him two decades, five possible sites, until he found a plot of land on the Everett-Boston border for his business in 2025. Kraft is planning to build a 25-thousand seat venue on a 43-acre piece of property that sits in Boston and in Everett along the Mystic River that houses a shuttered power plant.
According to the Boston Globe, the Celtics ownership group is checking out sites in Boston, South Boston and Everett. This is just a preliminary list. The Celtics business is a tenant of the Boston building and does not have the kind of access to revenue that other owners in the NBA in basketball specific venues get. There has been a trend for NBA owners to attempt to build basketball-based buildings that don’t conform to dual usage. The Dallas Mavericks ownership wants to build a building for just basketball and probably concerts. The optimum build for an NBA owner would be a venue with retail, residential and office space around the building. Sports owners are looking to build venue-villages although that might be a problem in a city like Boston where there is not that much available space. Meanwhile the Celtics ownership group is going nowhere for the next decade.
Evan Weiner’s books are available at iTunes – https://books.apple.com/us/author/evan-weiner/id595575191
Evan can be reached at evan_weiner@hotmail.com
