Mentioned more succinctly by other posters before me, but nothing Daniels is doing is accidental. He's using the same tactics grocery stores use to get you to buy more cans of beans than you'd want by advertising them as 10 for $10. They aren't lying, but they're leaving out the important part that the cans are $1 each anyway, knowing the sign is going to be interpreted as meaning you have to buy 10 to get them at a discount price.
The whole article is rife with these "lying by omission" and "loaded words" sleights of hand, but the real glaring example is this graf:
"Sacramento has scrambled since the Seattle deal was announced in January to put together a term sheet for an arena deal and investor group to counter the Hansen-led bid. Billionaire Ron Burkle was expected to join the Sacramento effort, but dropped out of the investment group this week citing a business conflict. Burkle has an ownership stake in Relativity Media, which has a division representing NBA players."
First off, "scrambled" conjures imagery of haphazardness, chaos, futility and unprofessionalism that "raced," "sped" or even "rushed" among many other possible word choices would not. But it's key when considering the sentence that follows and otherwise has absolutely no connection to the first. Burkle removing his name from the investor group and instead focusing on the redevelopment and arena building aspect (another inconvenient fact omitted) is not at all related to the hurried and, to put my own biased spin on it, nigh-miraculous pace at which Mayor Johnson has forged together said term sheet and investor group. But because the sentences are adjacent and the word "scrambled" is already implanted in the mind, the reader is left to assume they're connected.
And then Daniels drives home this perception by dropping the coup de grace of his three pronged attack, the anonymous source.
"A league source said the conflict was just one factor in Burkle's decision. Burkle “wasn’t all that fired up about this deal," the source said."
A "league source" could be anyone at all related to the NBA, from Commissioner Stern down to a hot dog vendor at Sleep Train Arena, and that's the least damning part of this quote. Let's not forget that Burkle was the first investor tapped by Mayor Johnson to take control of the team more than two years ago and instrumental in preventing the team's move to Anaheim, had a person-to-person private meeting with Commissioner Stern fairly immediately after the sale to the Seattle group had been announced, handpicked the K Street Mall site over the Railyards and is still a major player in the development aspect of the project. Given the evidence to the contrary, the quote makes little sense unless the "league source" is a master empath and can read the mind of this absurdly private man or you're a Seattle reader who knows none of that and believes Burkle was just one of the many California billionaires whose name KJ "scrambled" to slap on the term sheet.