How Everyone Loses

So Clay Bennett is bringing the NBA to OKC. For those of you who don’t know, well, get caught up. I’m not going to waste any time here laying out the details of how exactly the NBA team that was the Seattle Super Sonics came to be the tenants of the Ford Center in Oklahoma City. I am more concerned with laying out why this is tremendously unfair to all sides involved.

Why it sucks for Seattle:
The Sonics had been Seattle’s longest tenured team. I have, tragically, never been to Seattle, but I keep hearing that the people there love their team. This move will apparently devastate the good people of Seattle. I sympathize with them, I really do. However, the reason this really sucks is that the political and business leadership in Seattle are the people who screwed this up in the first place. The reason David Stern and the league didn’t back up the city was because they wouldn’t build a new, state-of-the-art arena for the Sonics. I’ve always thought this was a lousy thing to call a city out on, particularly if the arena they play in is still relatively new (check) and is designed for the sport (check). I understood why the Spurs wanted to build a new arena to get out of the Alamodome. The Alamodome was an arena designed for a football team (which they don’t have and weren’t going to get), and an NBA team is going to have a hard time operating in sub-standard facilities, but by all accounts (excluding David Stern) Key Arena was still in pretty good shape. So here’s what needed to happen for the Sonics to stay in Seattle:

A. The good people of Seattle need to consent to a tax hike to pay for new facilities for the Sonics. This seems reasonable from a prosperous city like Seattle. Two factors made this a little unreasonable 1. Safeco Field (opened in 1999) 2. Qwest Field (opened in 2002). That’s right folks, two other professional arenas built and completed at least two a good extent on the taxes on the locals within the last decade.

B. Have I mentioned yet that the previous owner of the Seattle Super Sonics was a guy named Howard Schultz? Oh yeah, he’s the CEO of Starbucks. So he really couldn’t foot the bill for a new arena? I mean, I guess it would’ve been unfair since the city bailed out the owners of the Seahawks and Mariners. So if Schultz wasn’t going to put up the funds for the Sonics, then obviously…

C. Hurricane Katrina should’ve been forcibly stopped by the collective will power of Ray Nagen and George W. Bush, but since they didn’t use their powers to hold back the oncoming waters of a deadly storm, the New Orleans Hornets (under supported) had to relocate for two seasons to Oklahoma City. Now a place like Oklahoma City works well for a professional franchise, and they deserve to get a team of some sort (more on this later). OKC opened up its arena and sold out a ton of games. Suddenly the NBA is viable in the land of clay and Indian casinos. This means….

D. Maybe you shouldn’t sell the franchise to investors from OKC unless you’re ok with them moving the team there. I mean this really wasn’t hard to predict was it? I don’t have any insider information, but after seeing the success of the Hornets in OKC, was it all that surprising to find out that the new owners were going to exploit the arena issues to move the team out of Seattle? Schultz said he had an agreement that Clay Bennett and the investors would do their best to keep the Sonics in Seattle. I mean, you knew what that meant right? You knew their “best” wasn’t going to be good enough, right? I mean Schultz must have some business sense, right? It’s not like he’s the CEO of a company that has locations on all four corners of every intersection in America, right?

The political and business leaders stepped in too late to try and keep the team in Seattle, but the lateness of their action makes me think that they are either 1. Incompetent (almost certainly with politicians) and/or 2. They just didn’t care that much about the team (seems highly likely). The losers on this side of the equation are definitely the good people of Seattle, but I think the fans in OKC deserve better than this as well, and that will be the subject of my next post.

-Dusty