Portland has been pulled into a full-on arena hostage situation

And the NBA doesn't appear willing to help one bit.

Good morning. It's July 21 and LeBron James is still a free agent. Let's basketball.

Ignoring that the Warriors and Clippers each recently changed zip codes, no NBA team has relocated since 2012, when the Nets moved from New Jersey to Brooklyn. That move wasn't terribly controversial, but it was technically the NBA's last relocation. There was an attempted relocation of the Kings from Sacramento to Seattle the following summer, but David Stern, in the waning days of his tenure as league commissioner, essentially blocked it by forcing the selling owners to consider a local pitch which came through with funding for a new downtown arena and the capital to bid a similar number to what the out-of-towners had put up.

Since then, it's all been quiet. The Bucks and Wolves were sold to new owners under painstaking restrictions on future movement. The Pelicans have remained in New Orleans despite frequent and rampant speculation about their future. The Nets are still in Brooklyn, apparently. Everything relocation has calmed down so much that the league has given a yellow light to expansion, taking the biggest relocation threats – Seattle and Las Vegas – off the table.

Even the Nets' move may not fully capture the picture of relocation since the team remained in essentially the same market. (That market is called "Nowhere." The Nets remain perhaps the least consequential franchise in the NBA, which is a real achievement.) If you want to go back to a knockdown, drag-out relocation, you have to revisit Seattle and Oklahoma City in 2008. What happened there is that a local business hero, Howard Schultz, got frustrated with city and state politics around renovations to Key Arena and sold the team to Oklahoma City businessfolk who'd had a taste of NBA life when hosting the New Orleans Hornets after Hurricane Katrina. The OKC bros pretended to engage with Seattle and Washington politicos for a minute under demand of Stern, essentially holding the governments hostage, and then called it quits and bolted for the Sooner State. It was a travesty of justice and a betrayal of the league's core customers. It remains a festering wound for the NBA, one that can only scar when the NBA adds a new franchise to the Emerald City.

The Nets moving to Brooklyn, the Warriors moving to San Francisco and the Clippers moving out of their big brother's garage aren't quite the same as a franchise with a 40-year track record packing up and moving 2,000 miles away.

It appears to be happening again, just down I-5 in Portland.