Breanna Stewart on Endless CBA Talks: ‘Just Starting’ to See End of Tunnel
SEATTLE — A massive storage closet sits four stories beneath Seattle Kraken owner Samantha Holloway’s suite. Located in the bowels of Climate Pledge Arena, where the Kraken play, its contents are nothing special: chairs, tables, and assorted objects the arena needs to store.
What’s atypical is the name on the plaque outside the door: NBA Locker Room. Holloway wants to make that title a reality.
This was part of the plan for the ownership group of one of the NHL’s youngest franchises, led by Holloway’s father, the late billionaire David Bonderman, who died in December, and movie executive Jerry Bruckheimer. When they brought pro hockey to Seattle in 2017, they also brought their vision for pro basketball.
Holloway—one of only three female owners in the NHL—has run the team for the past three years. Now, she’s not only focused on guiding the nascent Kraken franchise but also filling the void left when the Seattle SuperSonics moved to Oklahoma City in 2008.
The SuperSonics are one of the most famous teams to pull up stakes in modern sports history, right alongside the Brooklyn Dodgers and Hartford Whalers. Plans to bring the team back in the 17 years since it left have fluctuated, and NBA commissioner Adam Silver has flip-flopped in recent years over his appetite for expansion. On Thursday, Silver and FIBA secretary general Andreas Zagklis said the two sides will begin to explore a new European league together as partners, but there were “no new developments” on NBA expansion.
Holloway, who hails from Washington, D.C., has a lot to manage in her day-to-day with the Kraken. But she’s also constantly keeping an ear to NBA expansion talks. She’s ready to act if Silver gives it the green light—but knows she needs to be careful not to overpromise, lest she underdeliver.
“[My dad] said to somebody, ‘You know, I make no promises,’” Holloway tells Front Office Sports about reviving the Sonics. “And I feel like I certainly wouldn’t promise. There are so many unknowns, and I mean, first of all, it’s a privilege to even be considered. We’re waiting for the NBA and expansion may be on its radar, and it may not be.”
About 10 years ago, Holloway was in her father’s living room in Colorado when he had an announcement for the family: He was thinking about buying a hockey team. At the time, Holloway was living in Denver while working on GoSpotCheck, a software start-up she cofounded.
Bonderman, who cofounded the private equity firm TPG, wanted his daughter to join him with the NHL’s latest expansion team. It was a far cry from her day job. She dipped her toe in: Holloway became an initial investor in the Kraken, and occasionally traveled to Seattle for ownership meetings.
After Form.com bought GoSpotCheck in December 2020, she found herself at an inflection point. “It wasn’t until I sold my company that I was like, what’s next?” Holloway says. She realized she was ready to get more involved with the Kraken. She moved her family to Seattle and dived in.
In some ways, Holloway’s role with the Kraken was foretold. Two years earlier, Bonderman and Bruckheimer recruited Tod Leiweke, the NFL’s COO, to be the Kraken’s CEO. Bonderman mentioned to Leiweke in passing that he had a daughter who could become more involved with the organization over time.
“I think her getting involved was one of the most important things to him in the whole world, and what drives her every day is her dad’s vision,” Leiweke tells FOS.
Since moving to Seattle five years ago, Holloway has gone from investor to co-owner to the team’s owner, chairperson, and one of its governors. Along the way, she’s learned a lot about what the job entails, and has applied her background with tech and start-ups where she can. When building the team’s app, for example, she teamed with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, a minority owner, to help. She tells FOS the team’s broadcast business has been one of her bigger learning curves, and she’s leaned on Leiweke and his brother, Tim, the CEO of Oak View Group, for guidance when she needs it.
“It’s a start-up,” Holloway says. “I think just there’s so many different facets of it and the communication between the different pieces of the [organization]. We’re kind of in a growth phase now. It’s not that hard to learn a business, but it does take time.”
“If you asked me, ‘Would you think Sam is a tech person?’ without knowing, just spending time with her, I’d say no,” says team president Victor de Bonis. “I’ve worked with four different teams. Everybody’s the smartest in the room. Sam’s humble. She doesn’t think she knows everything.”
Launching the Kraken in 2021 during COVID-19 wasn’t without obstacles—especially when vaccine verification lines were longer than ones for concessions or merchandise. Still, the Kraken made the playoffs in their second season, eliminating the defending champion Avalanche in a seven-game first-round thriller. The team took the Dallas Stars to seven games in the second round before its run ended.
Sustaining that momentum has been difficult. Despite spending up to the salary cap this past offseason, the Kraken are currently 13th in the Western Conference standings and will miss the playoffs for the second consecutive season. She still leans on her father’s advice to navigate these challenges: Holloway says Bonderman was never a helicopter parent, and when he gave advice, she took it.
“This might seem simple, but it’s not, especially as a female executive, is he once told me not to be defensive,” Holloway says. “And that sticks with me, because it’s really important to model that you’re going to listen to other folks and you’re going to take it all in, and a lot of people’s instincts are to be defensive.”
Alongside sowing the NHL’s roots in Seattle, Bonderman and Bruckheimer’s ultimate vision was for the Kraken’s success to help bring back the Sonics, whose absence can still be felt in Seattle.
Bars continue to hang neon signs of the team’s logo, and the Simply Seattle store a few blocks from Pike Place Market boasts Sonics jerseys of Kevin Durant, Gary Payton, and Shawn Kemp atop its walls, serving as a makeshift rafter to honor the fallen franchise’s greatest players.
For years, the NBA was trending toward expansion shortly after the league agreed to its new media-rights deal in July 2024. But the Grousbeck family’s surprising decision to put the Boston Celtics for sale a week before the rights deal was finalized, and a month after winning the NBA Finals, put expansion talks on ice. The Celtics sold for a record $6.1 billion on March 20, but Silver said Thursday an approval is in the “preliminary” stages, which need to finish before expansion talks begin.
Holloway has had a unique role in this expansion purgatory. Bonderman had a minority stake in the Celtics when he died at age 82, an ownership slice that his daughter tells FOS equated to less than 5% of the team. His estate inherited it, which meant Holloway had a foot in both universes: the Celtics sale holding up expansion, and a group ready to make a bid if Silver returns to it.
The Celtics sale could push NBA expansion bids toward the $7 billion mark, and Holloway says the whole waiting game has been interesting from an investor’s standpoint as she gauges the appetite for a possible bid. The process has reminded her of another one of Bonderman’s lessons: “Don’t make a bad deal.”
“Different people have different levers,” Holloway says. “Some care about price, some care about timing. There’s all kinds of different things folks care about. We are getting our ducks in a row and having initial conversations, but there’s still so many unknowns. It’s really fascinating to put a deal together for something that may or may not ever happen at a price that nobody knows, at a timeline that nobody knows.”
For now, Holloway has her focus on the Kraken while awaiting Silver’s future plans. She isn’t into attention, but has been recognized more by fans as her role with the Kraken expanded. She’s found her conversations with them are more about the city’s recent franchise than its previous one.
“People do ask about the Sonics, but not as much as they do about the Kraken,” Holloway says. “So, I see that as a positive sign for the Kraken.”
Still, the NBA is always on her radar. As a Seattle transplant with no background in professional sports before joining her father’s Kraken ownership group, Holloway might not seem like the most likely candidate to bring the NBA back to the city. But she is intent on finishing the job her father started. Bonderman didn’t live long enough to see pro hoops return to Seattle, but he helped bring the NHL and left his daughter with the lessons to help the Kraken—and a potential NBA franchise—succeed.
“His legacy was her,” Leiweke says. “And her legacy is him.”
