An arena game may unfold.
To properly play the stadium and/or arena game, there must be competition between businesses. The owners of the National Basketball Association’s Philadelphia 76ers franchise, Harris Blitzer Sports and Entertainment, want to leave South Philadelphia, where they are tenants in an arena owned by Comcast, and move to another part of Philadelphia. The destination is Chinatown, but there’s a problem. Area residents want nothing to do with an arena in their neighborhood, and there have been protests for a year against the idea of building an arena in their backyard. Signs reading “No Stadium” hang in the windows of Chinatown businesses. Now the state of New Jersey may be getting into the arena game. There was a report that high-ranking New Jersey officials and members of Harris Blitzer Sports and Entertainment have been in ongoing arena talks for two months. If New Jersey could lure the 76ers’ ownership group across the Delaware River, the available property would be in Camden. It wouldn’t be the first time Camden has been in play for the 76ers’ business.
In 2020, the current owners of the 76ers wanted to build an arena in the Penn’s Landing waterfront area, but the proposal was rejected by the Delaware River Front Corporation. In December 1993, then-owner Harold Katz was willing to cross the Delaware and move his team to Camden, New Jersey, near the Ben Franklin Bridge that connects New Jersey to Philadelphia. Nothing came of it. Eventually, Philadelphia politicians paved the way for a new arena to be built on the south side of the city. Katz sold his team to Comcast in 1996. In 2011, the Harris-Blitzer Group bought the 76ers’ business and denied that they would move the team to Newark, New Jersey. The arena game could pit Philadelphia against Camden, New Jersey.
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