By Any Name, Samueli Wants an NBA Team

If Henry Samueli could persuade an NBA owner to move his team to the Arrowhead Pond and that owner wanted to identify his team with Los Angeles, Samueli would not stop him and the Anaheim City Council could not stop him.

Samueli owns the Ducks, runs the Pond and wants an NBA franchise there, either through purchase or by persuading an NBA owner to move.

After a news conference Thursday to unveil the Ducks’ new logo, which features the Anaheim name and an orange accent to represent Orange County, Samueli said he would not call an NBA team by a Los Angeles name but would not restrict another owner from doing so.

“If I’m the owner, certainly I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “If somebody else wanted to do that, I wouldn’t stand in their way. Put it this way: I wouldn’t prevent a team from coming here just for that reason.”

Whether a team would want to use the Los Angeles label in a market where the Lakers and Clippers already do so is hypothetical. Samueli said he and his wife, Susan, had met with NBA Commissioner David Stern and asked whether the league would allow a third team in Southern California. “He said that’s certainly a possibility,” Samueli said. “He did not rule that out.”

Samueli has looked into the availability of the Portland Trail Blazers, Seattle SuperSonics and Sacramento Kings. Without reference to a specific team, he said he had no offer on the table for any team and “no serious discussions ongoing.”

The Anaheim City Council this week unanimously approved an agreement in which the Pond, officially the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim, can remove Anaheim from the arena name if the teams playing there use Anaheim as “the first word and sole geographic identifier” in their names.

In a lawsuit that has cost the city $4 million so far, a jury found the Angels could call themselves the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim without violating a lease provision requiring the team name to “include the name Anaheim therein.”

However, under the agreement with the Pond, an NBA team could play there under another name so long as the arena name included Anaheim.

The naming rights contract for the Pond expires in September. The city and the Pond share revenue from naming rights, which could be more lucrative for both parties if a company were not required to use Anaheim in the arena name.