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Comcast-Spectacor Issues Statement in Response to Sixers + New Jersey Rumors
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In response to recent reporting about the Sixers and New Jersey, Comcast-Spectacor Chairman and CEO Dan Hilferty shared the following statement:
“We firmly believe that the best outcome for our fans and the community is the 76ers and Comcast-Spectacor, united and based in South Philadelphia.
To that end, we continue to offer the 76ers a 50/50 partnership of the Wells Fargo Center and have been clear that we’re open to building a new arena together at the right time.
The door will always be open for the 76ers and we sincerely hope together we can create a vision for what’s best for Philadelphia.”
The genesis of this scuttlebutt is a Friday story from Tom Bergeron, not the Hollywood Squares guy.
He’s a writer at ROI-NJ.com who published a story titled N.J. making serious push to lure Sixers to new arena in Camden:
The state of New Jersey is making a serious push to convince the Philadelphia 76ers to move to New Jersey and into a new arena that would be built in Camden, four people familiar with the discussions confirmed to ROI-NJ.
Discussions between top state officials and leaders from Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment (which owns the team) have been ongoing for the last two months, the sources said.
The sources indicated that talks have picked up recently, in part because HBSE’s efforts to build a new arena in Center City Philadelphia have hit repeated roadblocks, despite the fact that the owners have indicated they would self-finance the $1.3 billion proposed project.
Sixers officials are on the record saying that they will not move to New Jersey, and Governor Josh Shapiro is also on the record saying that “as a Governor, as a huge Sixers fan, I want to make sure the Sixers are here for a good, long while, and that they have a great facility to play in.”
The Comcast stance is that they’d like the Sixers to stay in South Philadelphia with them. If HBSE takes basketball to Market Street, or anywhere really, they’re now competing with Comcast for events like Disney on Ice and Roger Waters’ 15th-straight year playing in Philadelphia, and that’s been a huge point of contention between the two sides.
In a recent interview with Crossing Broad, Comcast-Spectacor Chairman and CEO Dan Hilferty explained what a 50/50 partnership with the Sixers would look like:
CB: What is the pitch to the Sixers anyway? Publicly you’ve said that you think it’s best that they stay here and build an arena together with you. Is that a straight 50/50 split on financing? Share the revenue from events right down the middle? What does that actually look like?
Hilferty: It’s exactly that. We’d love to have a 50/50 partnership. We’d have equal governance on the facility. We just went through this $400 million transformation and (the Wells Fargo Center) is a state-of-the-art arena. There’s more to come in that regard. If we could get a dialogue with Josh Harris and David Blitzer, and team, it would be about about forming that 50/50 partnership, and at the right time, together building a new arena. What we’ve invested in this arena, we want to make sure we get the life out of it, but we’re maintaining a site. Because whether the Sixers stay or go, at some point we’re going to build a new arena. It might be past my time here, but certainly we’re gonna do that. So we would say, “do this with us together, let’s go out and get the best acts,” which, by the way, 98% of the acts we want here, we get here. But let’s do it together, let’s compete against the world instead of competing against each other.
The Philadelphia Phillies are joining Comcast in their sports complex redevelopment plan. The Eagles might get involved, or might not. Nothing official on that front yet. Meantime, we’re waiting for the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC) study on the Market Street proposal, which is months late and may have been accidentally deleted off someone’s hard drive, or eaten by the dog.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com