Kansas City, Mo. ? Sprint Center: Professional sports venue, or $250 million bargaining chip?

Backers of the downtown arena, approved by voters Tuesday, envision the return of the NBA or the NHL to a city where both leagues already have tried and failed to make it.

But without a deal in hand, Kansas City only can hope the arena, scheduled to open in 2007, will see more than the return of the Big 12 Conference basketball tournament.

“If you build an arena on spec, then teams really have you over a barrel,” said Neil deMause, a New York-based writer and critic of public financing for sports stadiums.

Teams could demand inducements, deMause said, ranging from free rent to revenue from luxury boxes — even renovations, if the arena doesn’t find a tenant quickly — and then use those offers to negotiate better deals at home.

“Lord help Kansas City if they don’t get an NBA or NHL team within five to 10 years or so,” said deMause, co-author of “Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money Into Private Profit.” “That arena will be obsolete already.”

‘Pretty amazing’

But an attorney who represented the city of Louisville, Ky., in its unsuccessful attempts to land an NBA team said Kansas City was on the right track.

The attorney, J. Bruce Miller, credited the leadership of Kansas City Mayor Kay Barnes, noting that Louisville’s bid to attract the Hornets — they went to New Orleans instead — failed when the city could not put together an arena plan.

“You can’t do anything about the ultimate economic question, which is whether a mid-sized city can support three major-league sports,” Miller said. “But I’m not going to knock what happened up there, because the voters and the mayor did something pretty amazing.”

Kansas City’s voters approved a $170 million bond issue, which will be paid back through increases in hotel and car rental taxes. Another $10 million will come from the National Association of Basketball Coaches, with other money from private sources.

The project, however, will lose $20 million if Anschutz Entertainment Group, the Los Angeles company that has an informal agreement to manage the arena and invest $50 million in it, cannot find an NBA or NHL tenant.

Sprint Corp. has agreed to pay $2.5 million per year for 25 years for naming rights, but that will drop to $1.7 million annually if no major-league professional team plays there.

K.C.’s bad history

The city’s track record with major indoor sports is not good, though.

The NBA’s Kings, who relocated from Cincinnati in 1972 and spent three seasons splitting their home games between Kansas City and Omaha, moved on to Sacramento in 1985.

Playing in 16,000-seat Kemper Arena — and for one season in 9,600-seat Municipal Auditorium, when heavy snow collapsed the roof at Kemper — the Kings averaged more than 10,000 fans a game in only one season.

In their final season, they averaged 6,410. The city now has an ABA team, the Knights, which averaged about 1,500 fans in 5,000-seat Hale Arena last season.

Shortly after the Kings arrived, Kansas City also had an abortive fling with the NHL.

The expansion Kansas City Scouts played two losing seasons in Kemper Arena, from 1974 to 1976, before bolting for Colorado and subsequently moving again to New Jersey. Kansas City had a minor-league team, the International Hockey League’s Blades, but that league folded in 2001.

Given the Scouts’ failure to take hold, and the impending expiration of the NHL’s labor agreement without a new one in sight, the chances of landing an expansion hockey franchise in the near future seem slim.

Return of the Kings?

The NBA is more stable from a labor standpoint and attendance is up.

The NBA set an attendance record for regular and postseason play with a final attendance figure of 21,855,125, breaking the mark of 21,797,222 set during the 1995-96 season.

The NBA also reported its regular-season attendance of 17,050 was the highest since the 1997-98 season, when the average was 17,135.

But the league has expanded recently, with the addition of the Charlotte Bobcats to replace the departed Hornets.

Relocation is always a possibility, though — and one team’s name has already come up.

It’s a familiar one, too: On Thursday night, the Kings turned down Sacramento’s plan for a downtown arena because it capped the city’s contribution at $175 million.

The Kings’ owners, Joe and Gavin Maloof, have not threatened to leave the Sacramento area. But some city leaders told The Sacramento Bee they feared the team would relocate if an arena agreement cannot be reached.

“The Kings back in Kansas City,” deMause said. “Wouldn’t that be ironic?”