Portland Trail Blazers, Seattle Seahawks’ Jody Allen might be the most unusual pro sports owner ever
By Bruce Schoenfeld
08.04.2025
Jody Allen has been the owner of the Seahawks and Trail Blazers as executor of her late brother's estate since he passed away in 2018. Both teams are expected to be sold soon. Courtesy of Vulcan Sports and Entertainment
Her Portland Trail Blazers are playing the Los Angeles Lakers at the Moda Center one February evening and Jody Allen is all in. Wearing a black satin baseball jacket and funky glasses with thick frames, she’s perched at the front of her seat, nervously working through a mouthful of gum. As the shot clock expires at the end of a possession, a Laker tosses up a feeble jumper. When a Blazer gets called for a needless foul on the play, Allen throws her head back in dismay.
Before the game, Allen had met with Blazers President Dewayne Hankins and general manager Joe Cronin, which she does whenever she jets in from Seattle to see the team — about 30 times each season. Chatting about the starting lineup with her head coach, Chauncey Billups, before tipoff, she might be any NBA owner. In fact, she seems more engaged than many.
Allen
owns the Trail Blazers, just as she owns the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, in the sense that nobody else has a single share of either team. As much as anyone in the NFL, NBA, NHL or MLB, she wields complete control. If she wants to fire a head coach, she can fire a head coach. If she decides to trade a franchise quarterback or an All-Star point guard, nobody can stop her.
Her usual seat behind a basket at the Moda Center — the second one in from the aisle, in the front row of Section 118 — has been reserved for the owner since the arena opened. Until 2018, that was Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder and Jody’s older brother. Since his death that October from complications of lymphoma, it has been Jody.
Yet from another perspective, Jody Allen isn’t an owner at all. Technically, she is the executor of Paul Allen’s estate and the sole trustee of his assets. She represents the Blazers on the NBA’s board of governors and casts the Seahawks’ vote at the NFL’s equivalent, but eventually she is required by the terms of Paul Allen’s will to sell both teams.
And when she does sell them, she won’t get the money.
That makes her relationship with the two franchises among the strangest in the history of American sports. “I certainly never dealt with a situation like this,” says Adam Silver, the NBA’s commissioner since 2014, “and I was involved with the league for over two decades before I became commissioner.”
At the time of his death, Paul Allen’s holdings had an estimated value of around $20 billion. That made his estate the largest of any American in history, and probably anyone ever. It was also spectacularly complicated. “There are many things that still need to be unwound,” says attorney Allen Israel of the Seattle firm Foster Garvey, who has represented the Allens and their interests since 1985.
As Israel describes it, the will decrees that Allen’s assets all be liquidated and “an overwhelming percentage” of the proceeds used for philanthropy. Nearly all of the estate already has been sold, including most of a vast art collection; real estate holdings; a company that built an aircraft with the world’s largest wingspan; Seattle’s Cinerama movie theater; and a 414-foot yacht named Octopus. But seven years after Paul’s death, both the Trail Blazers and the Seahawks remain.
“There was no sense … that she was interim in some way. It was absolutely clear that she was overseeing this team in the same manner that any other governor would.”
— Adam Silver, NBA commissioner
The reasons for that are both complicated and simple. Jody’s fiduciary duty includes generating revenue by selling the sports teams. So it’s worth noting that, during the time she has owned them, both have appreciated dramatically. In 2018, a sale of the two teams would have generated between $3.5 and $4 billion — $1.5 billion for the Trail Blazers, and the rest for the Seahawks. Today, that total could be as much as $10 billion. That includes the benefits of a new NBA media rights deal, and the expiration of a ghost-equity clause in the public-financing deal for what is now Lumen Field that would have given the state of Washington 10% of the gross proceeds if the Seahawks were sold before May 2024.
Trail Blazers owner Jody Allen tries to see about 30 home games a season and say hello to players like Deni Avdija, who is from Israel. Courtesy of Vulcan Sports and Entertainment
There also have been spacing issues with Paul Allen’s estate; the strategy has been to spread out the liquidation of the assets.
But mostly, they remain unsold because Jody Allen hasn’t wanted to sell them.
“She did get a lot of pressure from people to sell soon after Paul passed,” says Bert Kolde, Paul Allen’s college roommate at Washington State, who has worked closely with the family since the mid-1980s. “People just assumed that she would have to sell both teams soon, or in the near future.” A published list of potential suitors for the Seahawks included Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos and Steve Ballmer, three of the world’s wealthiest individuals.
In 2022, a partnership led by Nike founder Phil Knight made a bid for the Trail Blazers that exceeded $2 billion. Knight promised to keep the team in Portland, which is assumed to be a condition of any sale. “I would say to her, ‘Take the offer,’” Larry Miller, a former Blazers president, told The New York Post at the time. Allen didn’t take it, and she didn’t negotiate. Instead, she issued a terse statement through the club, saying that it wasn’t for sale.
In fact, she hasn’t answered any questions about her ownership of either team. While Paul Allen limited public interactions because they made him feel uncomfortable, his sister doesn’t consider them part of her job description, apart from very occasionally standing at a podium to announce an initiative. She prefers to let Blazers executives speak for the Blazers and Seahawks executives speak for the Seahawks, the reason given for her not directly participating in this story with an interview.
Jody and Paul Allen attend the opening of the Experience Music Project, now Museum of Pop Culture, in 2000. Courtesy of Vulcan Sports and Entertainment
Because of that, much about her situation remains misunderstood. “It’s kind of like that little game telephone — you whisper something to one kid, and then he whispers to the next kid and it goes around the circle,” says Bob Whitsitt, who ran both the Trail Blazers and Seahawks under Paul Allen. “By the time it gets back to you, it’s not even close to what you whispered out there.”
In March, the Boston Celtics, valued at $6.1 billion, were sold. With that announcement, the valuation of every other team made a dramatic jump. Several weeks later, another terse statement was issued: The Blazers were now officially available. Then the Buss family agreed to sell the Lakers, who were valued at $10 billion. If the Blazers were worth somewhere between $3 billion and $4 billion following the Celtics sale, what are they worth now?
Jody Allen was close with Paul, helping him run the family business, and joining him at the Seattle Art Fair in 2017. Courtesy of Vulcan Sports and Entertainment
Allen is in no hurry to find out. After a few years of what some former executives describe as inattention, especially regarding the Trail Blazers, she recently has been as engaged as her brother ever was, at least with the largest issues. She made the decision to buy out the contract of the popular Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, then met with him herself to explain it. She plotted strategy with her general managers, usually on a daily basis, during the negotiations that led to the trades of franchise quarterback Russell Wilson and Damian Lillard, the Blazers’ All-Star guard.
Simultaneously, she was investing in the teams like someone who planned to be around a while. She authorized the construction of a new weight room at the Seahawks’ practice facility and pushed for a fast-tracked creation of a G League affiliate for the Blazers. “There was no sense of ‘Whatever everyone else decides, I’m fine with’ — that she was interim in some way,” says the NBA’s Silver. “It was absolutely clear that she was overseeing this team in the same manner that any other governor would.”
“I actually think she has done a hell of a job.”
— Tod Leiweke, Seattle Kraken CEO
As she has become more involved, public pressure has eased. Instead of urging her to sell the teams, sports talk shows and newspaper columns and Reddit subgroups are now more likely to express concern about what might happen when she does.
It helps that results on the field and the court are trending positively, though neither team is back in the playoffs. The Seahawks, a perennial power under Paul Allen, hadn’t won more than nine games since 2020. In their first year under Mike Macdonald, who replaced Carroll in 2024, they won 10. The Blazers, who played in the postseason for 22 of the 30 seasons of Paul Allen’s tenure, haven’t managed that since 2021. But they parlayed Lillard into a core of young talent and show signs of rejuvenation.
Jody has been intimately involved with both rebuilds. “I actually think,” says Seattle Kraken CEO Tod Leiweke, who worked for the Seahawks from 2003 to 2010, “she has done a hell of a job.”
The son of a teacher and a librarian, Paul Allen was an original thinker who, famously, had a higher SAT score than his Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Dubbed an “accidental zillionaire” by Wired Magazine in 1994, he was driven by the inner workings of technology, according to Laura Rich, the author who used the phrase as the name for her Allen biography, rather than making money. One former Blazers executive says he could have been happy working at a record store. Or writing code.
In 1983, after the first of three cancer diagnoses, Allen left Microsoft and embarked on a life of freewheeling entrepreneurship. Most of the ideas he conjured up, involving companies and museums and institutes, he relied on his sister to implement. “She was very, very fundamental to his world, and his world was complicated,” says Leiweke.
Jody Allen, six years younger, majored in drama at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash. Paul’s only sibling, she was soliciting donations for the Pacific Northwest Ballet in 1986 when Paul convinced her to resign and help him found Vulcan Inc., a family office that would oversee his diverse holdings. As the accidental zillionaire’s sister, she’s as unlikely an owner of two big-league teams as American sports has seen.
By 1986, Paul Allen was already rich and famous. Jody Allen was unknown — and preferred to stay that way. Fortuitously, her skills complemented his. “Paul is more an idea person,” says the Seahawks’ John Schneider, who first worked for the club in 2000 and has been the general manager since 2010. “She is a decision-maker.”
Jody eventually had a family: a two-decade marriage to Brian Patton, who owned and managed golf courses, and three children. Her brother never did. “She was the closest person to Paul,” Kolde says. The two of them lived in adjacent houses in a family compound on Mercer Island. At Vulcan (now known as Vale Group), they had offices on the same hallway. “They would travel together,” says Kolde. “They would visit together and discuss everything. ‘Should we buy the team?’ ‘Should we do this referendum?’ ‘Should we hire Mike Holmgren?’ ‘Should we hire Pete Carroll?’”
“Paul is more an idea person. She is a decision-maker.”
— John Schneider, Seattle Seahawks general manager
But while she had positions with genuine influence and power, she rarely appeared in public. Inside the sports teams, too, she remained a shadowy presence. “She was very much in tune with what was going on with both teams, but also very much behind the scenes,” Schneider says. During the nine years he ran the Trail Blazers, Whitsitt remembers seeing Jody at a game only a handful of times, and never in an official capacity.
In part because of her children, Allen cultivated an air of inaccessibility. In 2000, for example, former Lakeside School classmates who were running the class of 1975’s 25th reunion repeatedly reached out with invitations to attend. She didn’t respond, according to one teacher at the school. On the night of the event, “she showed up unannounced — and brought a guest.” Her biggest public exposure came in 2013, when former security guards accused her under oath of, among other improprieties, bribing officials to smuggle giraffe and penguin bones out of Africa and Antarctica, and falsifying customs declarations. No criminal charges were filed. After two years of litigation, the case was settled out of court.
But from the time she joined her brother to co-found Vulcan in 1986 until his death, she was tasked with transforming his creative thoughts into reality. “It’s one thing to have a vision and an idea,” says Patty Isacson Sabee, who spent 10 years at what became the Allen’s Museum of Popular Culture, three as executive director, and now runs the Detroit Opera. “It’s another to take a kernel of an idea and make it happen.”
Much of that happened outside sports, including various scientific initiatives and cultural projects, in Seattle and beyond. The most visible of those was the Museum of Popular Culture, or MoPOP. In the early 1990s, Paul Allen acquired the guitar that Jimi Hendrix, a Seattle native, used at Woodstock. Eventually, he amassed a collection of Hendrix memorabilia. That led to an idea for a museum devoted to Hendrix to be built adjacent to the Space Needle near Lake Union.
In 1988, Jody Allen supervised the design and construction of the Rose Garden, which became the Moda Center, figuring out how as she went along. “Jody executed the vision,” says Israel. “Basically, she was in charge of the development. She did everything.” Now she did the same for a $240 million museum. First, she convinced Paul that Frank Gehry, who had recently finished the Guggenheim Bilbao, should design it. Then she wrote the plan for its construction and curated the initial exhibits.
The museum opened as the Experience Music Project. Before long, Paul decided to insert science fiction, another of his passions, into an attraction meant to honor a virtuoso guitarist. When Jody tried to convince him that the result would be unwieldy, he implored her to make it happen. She rolled her eyes but figured out a solution. Later, he added horror and fantasy. MoPOP was the eventual result.
Despite few public appearances and speaking engagements, owner Jody Allen was front and center in the Blazers’ war room for the 2025 NBA Draft. Courtesy of Vulcan Sports and Entertainment
Paul Allen had purchased the Trail Blazers in 1985 because he loved basketball. Despite a schedule filled with international travel, he found a way to get to most home games. He seemed to have little interest in football beyond the occasional University of Washington game. In 1996, Gary Locke, then the King County chief executive and soon to be Washington’s governor, met with both Allens to see if they would help keep the Seahawks in Seattle. It soon became clear that meant buying them.
Ken Behring, the owner, had provisionally relocated the team from the increasingly dilapidated Kingdome to Anaheim while awaiting NFL approval. Paul and Jody understood the effects that losing it would have on the city. They agreed to acquire the Seahawks for $200 million, but only if a new stadium could be built using a public-private partnership. That led to a 16-month window during which Paul Allen held an exclusive option.
Not only did deals need to be made with Seattle and King County, but the stadium project needed to pass a statewide referendum. These were not tasks suited to Paul’s strengths, but they were perfect for Jody. “Everybody says, ‘Oh, it’s Paul Allen’s sister,’ in kind of a denigrating way,” says Judy Runstad, a land-use attorney who worked for Vulcan during that negotiation period. “But they don’t know that she’s the one that assembled the entire team of consultants and lawyers and you-name-it that it took to get that stadium built.”
“She doesn’t micromanage. She encourages diversity of thought and opinion. She enjoys and encourages robust discussion. And every so often, she’ll have this little bit of sly humor.”
— Gary Locke, former Washington governor
The referendum passed in 1997 by only a few thousand votes. In a sense, that began the process. Jody Allen’s team went to work. “She was very clear about us each having our lane,” Runstad says. “My lane was making sure this damned thing got approved. And it was incredibly complex and very political. Somebody else’s lane was making sure that it got built the right way. Somebody else’s was making sure the public relations were properly handled.”
Each Wednesday afternoon, Allen ran a meeting in the Vulcan offices. She’d go around the table asking for updates, saying little at first. “But she’s absorbing everything and thinking about it, and then coming back with some salient comment,” says Runstad. By the accounts of several people who attended the meetings, it was a virtuoso performance. “She doesn’t micromanage,” says Locke, who has worked with her in recent years on the board of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a bioscience nonprofit. “She encourages diversity of thought and opinion. She enjoys and encourages robust discussion. And every so often, she’ll have this little bit of sly humor.”
“Jody commands a room a bit more than her brother did,” Silver says now. “There’s certain similarities in terms of intelligence and analytical abilities, but at the same time I saw the differences in their personalities. Jody is a stronger voice.”
Seahawks Stadium, now Lumen Field, opened in July 2002. Built in part using recycled rubble from the Kingdome’s demolition, it debuted as one of the most technologically advanced stadiums up to that point. That was crucial to both Allens — how could Paul’s team play in a stadium that was not on the cutting edge? That idea, that the Seahawks are one of the NFL’s most forward-thinking franchises, has informed their brand now for nearly a quarter-century. “She’s got her fingerprints all over that building,” says Seahawks President Chuck Arnold. “And when you think about it, it is still one of the marquee buildings in the NFL today.”
Watching Jody Allen orchestrate that process all those years ago convinced Runstad that she was as smart, in her own way, as her famously brilliant brother, and certainly just as suited to run the Seahawks and Trail Blazers. “You could not have managed the complexities of that project and not be able to manage the complexities of the sports teams as she’s doing today,” she says now. “You just couldn’t.”
In late June 2023, agent Aaron Goodwin called Blazers GM Cronin to confirm what was already all over social media: His client Damian Lillard wanted out. With Portland not even a playoff team, Lillard wanted to leave to try to win a championship. After 11 seasons, he believed he’d earned the opportunity.
Within minutes, a conference call had been convened. Allen said that the club should honor Lillard’s wishes, but in a way that fulfilled the long-term interests of the franchise. “Jody gave us clear direction to explore all options, to explore them with rational thinking and to think outside the box,” Hankins says.
They knew that public relations would be a challenge. Lillard had spent 11 seasons as the biggest star of Portland’s only team in North America’s four most visible leagues. His profile in the city might have been even bigger than Wilson’s in Seattle. “Despite all of the potential pitfalls where emotion and ego can take over a situation like this, Jody’s direction was to take all of that out of it,” Hankins says.
In the years following Paul’s death, Jody had been criticized for a lack of oversight of her basketball team. General manager Neil Olshey was investigated for creating a hostile work environment, and Chris McGowan resigned as CEO of Vulcan Sports & Entertainment and the top executive on the Blazers’ business side. “Ever since owner Paul Allen passed away in October 2018, things haven’t been the same,” Jason Quick wrote in The Athletic. “When he died, so too did much of the Blazers.”
For better or worse, nobody was calling her detached after the Lillard deal. Much of that summer, she spoke with Cronin and Hankins daily. It wasn’t just a question of keeping up to speed, but specific options involving players on various teams. Ultimately, Cronin sent Lillard not to Miami, his desired destination, but Milwaukee, which at least seemed like a contender at the time. The Blazers received three players plus draft picks. Cronin flipped one of those players, Jrue Holiday, for two more draft picks and two more players. One of those, Malcolm Brogdon, he later sent to the Wizards for Israeli forward Deni Avdija, a player he had been coveting. With that team in place, the Blazers reeled off a six-game winning streak beginning last January, their most successful run in years.
A few months after the Lillard trade, Allen sanctioned another emotionally freighted move. Since 2020, the Seahawks had deteriorated from one of the NFL’s elite teams — winners of at least 10 games in eight of nine seasons — to an also-ran. Trading Wilson was part of the solution. But Carroll remained loyal to his staff of assistants, and Allen was convinced that further change was needed. “You’re talking about a franchise quarterback and the only coach who has won a world championship with the Seahawks,” says Schneider. “These are hard decisions.”
“She’s got a great smell for bullshit when she sees it. She knows where the stress points are.”
— Mike Macdonald, Seattle Seahawks coach
She met with Carroll one-on-one, created a consulting job so he could stay with the organization, then personally interviewed candidates to replace him. “No drama,” Leiweke notes.
By hiring Macdonald, the Seahawks segued from the NFL’s oldest coach (Carroll was then 72) to its youngest (Macdonald was 36). On the Monday after each game last season, Allen met with team executives to review what had worked and what hadn’t. “It’s robust conversation,” says Kolde, who attended the meetings. “And that’s not the kind of thing Paul might have been comfortable doing. He might just have sent a bunch of emails that said, “What about a-b-c-d-e-f-g?’” Attempts to gloss over details received immediate pushback. “She’s got a great smell for bullshit when she sees it,” Macdonald says. “She knows where the stress points are.”
Allen’s expectations for her employees have caused issues in the past. Pressure in the workplace can be intense, according to several former executives, many of whom are unable to speak on the record because of contractual agreements. “She’s got this thing she likes to say: ‘I want to win in every category,’” Arnold says. “And that means we need to have the best social media account, we need to have the best community outreach, we need to have the best marketing, top ticket sales — all of those things.”
“She’s got this thing she likes to say: ‘I want to win in every category.’”
— Chuck Arnold, Seattle Seahawks president
She’s also intensely competitive. In November 2022, much of Paul Allen’s art collection was sold, piece by piece, at Christie’s in New York. It included works by van Gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin and Klimt. Bidding was robust. “It was clear where the numbers were going,” says Kolde. In an observation room off the main floor, Jody rooted like she were at a Seahawks game.
“She’s happy winning,” Kolde says. In the end, the total amounted to $1.6 billion — an unambiguous win. It was the most for a single-owner art sale in history.
Within months, the Allen family will likely not have ties to the Trail Blazers for the first time in nearly four decades. The Celtics valuation was one of several factors that convinced Allen the time was finally right to sell the NBA team. A successful negotiation with the city of Portland for a bridge deal for the Moda Center means that a new owner will have around five years, and an option for five more, to decide to renovate or rebuild. A plan to expand the league to 32 teams, a process that will distribute several billion dollars among the current franchises, is expected to be discussed at league meetings this month.
Once the Blazers sale is done, Kolde hints, the Seahawks won’t be far behind. “This isn’t a forever story,” he says.
Jody Allen talks with new coach Mike Macdonald as team President Chuck Arnold looks on during training camp before the 2024 season. Courtesy of Vulcan Sports and Entertainment
For what it’s worth, a recent AI assessment valued the Seahawks at $7 billion and the Blazers at close to $4 billion, a bit higher than CNBC’s recent valuations of around $6 billion and $3.5 billion. But as with the Celtics and Lakers, and the Cezannes and Gauguins at Christie’s, valuations could become irrelevant when the bidding starts. It’s possible that the sale of the two teams will end up netting even more.
Whatever the numbers, the teams (including a minority share in MLS’s Seattle Sounders) will be by far the largest single component of a total charitable distribution that could exceed $25 billion. That, more than any championship she might win in her remaining months as an accidental owner, will be Allen’s legacy, as well as a tribute to the transformative power of sports.
And then, with the teams gone, she will turn her attention to giving all that money away.
Bruce Schoenfeld has been a regular contributor to Sports Business Journal since 1998. He can be reached at bruce@bruceschoenfeld.com.
The Jody Allen File
Born: Jo Lynn Allen, Feb. 3, 1959
Education: Whitman College, drama (1980)
Family: Brother, Paul Allen; 3 children
Current: Paul G. Allen Trust, trustee; Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trail Blazers, chair; Seattle Sounders FC, minority owner; Vale Group, chair; Vulcan Sports and Entertainment, chair; First & Goal Inc., chair; Allen Family Philanthropies, board chair and president; Allen Institute, board chair
Current boards: Museum of Pop Culture (chair); Sealife Response, Rehab and Research (SR3); Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2); Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa
Timeline
1986
- Works collecting donations for Pacific Northwest Ballet
- Vulcan Inc. (now Vale Group), co-founder (with brother, Paul Allen)
1988
The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation (Allen Family Philanthropies), co-founder
1993
Over a course of just six weeks, and without the threat of leaving town, Jody leads the successful public-private effort to fund construction of the $262 million Rose Garden (now Moda Center), which opened in 1995 as the home of the Portland Trail Blazers and the Western Hockey League Portland Winterhawks
1997
First & Goal Inc., vice chair
2000
Experience Music Project (now Museum of Pop Culture), co-founder
1997-2002
Helps negotiate the public-private partnership that leads to the 2002 opening of the $430 million Seahawks Stadium (now Lumen Field)
2003
The Allen Institute, co-founder
2007
Vulcan Sports and Entertainment, president
2014
Seahawks defeat the Denver Broncos for their only Super Bowl win
2016
- Wild Lives Foundation, founder
- Sounders win their first of two MLS Cup championships
2018
Following Paul’s death, named trustee and executor of his estate
2018-present
Oversees the Allen family-related funding of more than $50 million to the University of Washington, primarily supporting the areas of medicine and engineering, and pushing the Allens’ lifetime giving to the school to more than $200 million
2020
Alongside the Trail Blazers, pledges more than $1.4 million for game-night employees at Moda Center, due to the rescheduling and to aid with COVID-19 impact
May 2025
Estate of Paul Allen formally puts Trail Blazers up for sale
— SBJ Research
