Rick Pitino Reportedly Blocked Hornets' Potential Move to Louisville

Former Louisville head basketball coach Rick Pitino reportedly blocked a deal that would have resulted in the then-Charlotte Hornets moving to Louisville.

Per Joe Nocera, Eben Novy-Williams and Michael McDonald of Bloomberg News, Pitino and former Louisville athletic director Tom Jurich squashed a non-binding agreement the Hornets had with city burghers to move to Louisville and share an arena with the Cardinals. 

"They had no intention of sharing an arena with an NBA team—they didn’t even want to share the city with an NBA team," Nocera, Novy-Williams and McDonald wrote. "Louisville was theirs. David Stern, who was then commissioner of the NBA, recalls thinking, 'If Rick Pitino doesn’t want us there, why are we going there?' The Hornets went to New Orleans instead."

Despite missing out on having a professional basketball team, the city of Louisville broke ground on a new arena for the Cardinals in November 2006. 

The 22,000-seat KFC Yum! Center opened in October 2010, just in time for the Cardinals' 2010-11 season. 

The Bloomberg report noted that Jurich negotiated "an astonishingly lopsided lease that gave the athletic department almost total control of the arena from Oct. 1 until the end of basketball season, while reaping almost 90 percent of the revenue from premium seats and all the profit from VIP, courtside seating."

In 2015, Louisville earned $20 million in profits just from the arena, but the actual building was losing $17 million because the city was never able to develop areas around the arena to drive more business. 

Pitino was fired by Louisville in October amid a massive bribery and corruption scandal that directed high-profile recruits to certain schools and resulted in FBI charges against 10 people including assistant college coaches and Adidas employees.