South Basin Hoops Clinches a Midweek Arena Share
The minor-league club will play ten home dates downtown after years of gymnasiums and awkward start times.
South Basin Hoops secured a deal to play ten midweek home games at the downtown civic arena next season, ending a stretch of high-school gymnasiums and split crowds.
The three-year license, signed May 8 and disclosed in summary form at the civic arena authority’s monthly meeting, covers ten dates in year one with options for twelve and fourteen in years two and three. Hoops pays a flat $9,200 per date plus 4 percent of gross concessions above a $14,000 threshold. The club keeps its ticket revenue and its local broadcast rights. The arena keeps parking and signage.
The arena’s primary tenant keeps weekends. Hoops takes Tuesdays and select Thursdays, with a capped ticket scale meant to keep the building from feeling empty. Top price is $34, down from what the club’s business plan originally floated, and the upper bowl - about 3,100 of the arena’s 7,600 seats - will be tarped for most dates. Arena general manager Rosalind Feke said the tarp is not an admission of weakness but a production choice. “Four thousand people in a building sized for four thousand sounds like a sellout,” she said. “Four thousand people in a building sized for seventy-six hundred sounds like a rumor.”
Owner-operator Leah Kim called the agreement “a bridge, not a destination.” Long-term, the club still wants a dedicated mid-size venue near the basin.
Kim has been saying a version of that since she bought the club out of dormancy in 2022 for a figure she has never disclosed. The dedicated-venue plan she circulated to the port district last autumn imagined a 4,500-seat building on the old cordage parcel at the head of the Second Basin, financed largely privately with a public contribution for site work and transit. It has not advanced. The port district’s real estate committee has not scheduled it, and its chair, Bernard Ottoline, told The Harbor Ledger the parcel remains under environmental review with no completion date. “I am not going to hold a hearing on a basketball arena for land we cannot yet describe,” he said.
Players will notice the floor first. “A real painted key does something to your head,” said captain Jamal Orr after touring the locker wing. Orr, in his fourth season with the club and its longest-tenured player, spent two of those years in a gym at Kestrel High where the sideline ran two feet from a cinderblock wall and the shot clock was operated from a folding table. The civic arena has a nine-foot dead-ball run-off, a proper scorer’s table, and a training room the club will share with the primary tenant on a schedule that is still being negotiated.
## What the neighborhood asked for
Transit officials will add late bus service on game nights. The plan, presented to the transit board on May 11, extends the 14 and the 22 by two round trips each after a 7 p.m. tip, at an annual cost estimated at $148,000. The club is contributing $40,000 of that; the arena authority $35,000; the rest comes from the transit agency’s special-service reserve.
Neighborhood groups asked for a parking management plan before the first tipoff. The Ledger Hill Residents’ Council has been through this before, during the primary tenant’s playoff run in 2024, when residential streets four blocks deep filled with cars and the council’s own survey counted 61 vehicles parked across driveways or within fifteen feet of hydrants on a single night.
Council president Ingrid Vasa is not opposed to the club. She is opposed to the sequence. “Every time, the events come first and the management plan comes second, and the second thing arrives after the neighborhood has spent a season learning to hate the first thing,” she said. “Ten Tuesdays is not a catastrophe. It is a rehearsal for twenty Tuesdays, and nobody will renegotiate the parking once the habit sets.”
The city’s transportation department has committed to a permit study over the summer but not to a permit program, a distinction Vasa noticed immediately. Feke, for her part, argued that a midweek 7 p.m. tip is close to the best possible case: the office garages on Fathom Street empty out by six and hold 1,900 cars that sit unused on weeknights. The arena has an agreement with two of the four garage operators and is negotiating with the others.
There is a competitive question underneath the logistics. Hoops finished 19-25 last season and drew an announced average of 1,340, a number the club’s own staff will privately concede was generous. A 4,000-seat night at $34 top and $12 bottom is a different business, but only if the club can produce it more than twice.
Kim’s answer is a schedule built around the calendar rather than the standings: three of the ten dates are tied to school-district nights, two to trade-union nights arranged through the terminal locals, and one to the club’s long-running youth program, which has 610 registered players across four age brackets and has never had a downtown home to visit.
The season opens November 10, a Tuesday. Orr, standing at half court during the tour, walked the length of the arc twice without saying anything, then stopped at the corner where the seats come closest to the floor. “Right here,” he said. “This is where they will get to us.” He sounded pleased about it.
Reporting for this story was prepared for The Harbor Ledger’s sports desk. Tips:newsroom@theharborledger.com