A local billionaire sells the beloved NBA team to an out-of-town owner. The new owner demands hundreds of millions of dollars in tax money for a renovated arena. The threat is implicit before it is explicit: Hand over the money or I will take my new basketball team and leave town.

Groan if you’ve heard this before.

The situation playing out in Portland, where the Trail Blazers’ new owner has done nothing but antagonize fans and elected officials alike since buying the team last spring, is creating an unsettling sense of déjà vu in Seattle, where a similar set of circumstances led to the loss of the Sonics nearly 20 years ago.

Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon, who bought the team in March from Jody Allen for $4.25 billion, is demanding that taxpayers commit nearly $600 million for a renovation of the city-owned Moda Center, the team’s arena. Two decades ago, Sonics owner Howard Schultz demanded that Seattle taxpayers pay to renovate city-owned KeyArena. When they didn’t immediately assent, Schultz sold the team in 2006 to a group from Oklahoma. Two years later, the Sonics were gone, reincarnated as the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Portland now faces the same prospect: An irreplaceable institution, part of the fabric of civic life for more than half a century, is now owned by and subject to the whims of someone with no real connection to the city.

“We are in a really tough position,” Portland City Councilor Elana Pirtle-Guiney said Wednesday. “We have a massive decision about what to do with a city-owned space and we don’t have a good-faith negotiating partner.”

On Wednesday, the Portland City Council passed a framework to begin negotiations with the Blazers that would see the city contribute $120 million toward the Moda Center’s renovation (plus $275 million for the next 20 years of routine maintenance), with Multnomah County and the state of Oregon paying the rest of the costs.

“It is a critical investment in the future of our city, our economy and our community identity,” City Councilor Loretta Smith said in support.

“Every dollar that we commit here is a dollar that’s not going to be available for parks and housing and public safety,” City Councilor Candace Avalos said in opposition. “The owners should be making a meaningful private financial contribution.”

Under the framework, the Trail Blazers would have to pay $5 million a year to use the Moda Center, a number that Dundon has balked at. Negotiations between the team and the city will continue through the end of the year.

In Seattle, Jason Reid, like so many jilted NBA fans, is still not over the Sonics. “We’re at, best case scenario, 20% of my lifetime without a team,” he said. “And how much heartache we’ve gone through trying to get a team back.”

Reid, the director of the documentary Sonicsgate, which chronicled the team’s departure, has been watching the impending fiasco in Portland, as the city argues over funding the Moda Center and tries to negotiate with an obstinate owner.

It’s all felt a little uncanny.

“They’re going to have to do it or they’re going to lose the team, it’s very clear,” Reid said. “Everyone knows the rules of the game.”

Portland has not identified where it will come up with the $120 million. Dundon and the Trail Blazers have refused to give details — costs, designs, plans — on how the renovation money would be spent.

It doesn’t sit well with anyone, Reid said, this sense that a city with schools to fund, housing to build, roads to pave, cops and firefighters to pay, needs to find money for a billionaire’s stadium, and the billionaire won’t even say how he intends to use it.

But this is the precedent the Sonics set. It’s a precedent, Reid said, that the NBA Board of Governors — a collection of 30 billionaire team owners — very much wants to maintain: Pay for a stadium or risk losing your team.

“They want to be able to use that threat, relocation as a threat,” Reid said.

Since the Sonics left, at least 17 NBA arenas — housing more than half the league — have been built or renovated using public funds.

“It is a common practice for private, for-profit pro sports team owners to make major demands on local governments while they reap the incredible profits,” said Peter Steinbrueck, who was a Seattle City Council member when the city was negotiating with the Sonics.

“I would tell them to take a hike and build it themselves,” Steinbrueck said. “I’m not against sports, but it is a huge, huge racket.”

Schultz, the former Starbucks CEO, sold the Sonics and the WNBA Storm to out-of-town owners because he said he was losing money. But his ownership group made a $150 million profit on the sale. Had he held onto the team, the Sonics would now likely be worth at least 20 times what he paid for them.

Does Dundon want to move the team out of Portland? Or is he just playing hardball, trying to extract every cent of public money he can get?

It’s not clear.

And that lack of clarity is at least one small point that could buoy Blazers fans’ battered spirits.

“In Seattle’s case it was very clear that Oklahoma City was their goal from the second that it was announced the team was sold,” said former Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, who had been negotiating with Schultz on a possible arena deal before the Starbucks honcho chose to sell the team.

Emails among the Oklahoma City ownership group showed them talking about moving the team just months after purchasing it, while they were still publicly claiming they wanted to stay in Seattle

State and city politicians and voters said no to funding a new Sonics arena, after already having helped pay for new stadiums for the Seahawks and the Mariners — both of whom had also threatened to move if they didn’t get publicly funded stadiums.

“Basically they told us baseball got something and football got something, we want something,” Nickels said of the Sonics’ ownership demands. “Which is not a really strong public argument.”

Nickels is still offended by the idea of taxpayers essentially being held hostage by a team.

“The owners make a ton of money,” he said. “It’s just unthinkable that the team should be threatened with being moved somewhere else.”

Sonics ownership may not have had a strong argument, but what they did have was leverage. There are only 30 NBA teams and there are more than 30 cities that want one.

If it does all fall apart in Portland, where might Dundon take his team? Seattle, it must be noted, has a newly renovated arena, is enmeshed in an interminable expansion process, and is still in search of an NBA team, 18 years after the Sonics left.

“If they approach Seattle, this new Portland ownership, I would hope that we would give them the finger,” Nickels said. “We do not need to steal a team from another city.”