The Seattle SuperSonics have died. The team bequeathed one NBA
championship title and several YouTube videos of
Shawn Kemp dunks to their Starbucks-addicted fans. They are
survived by the Seattle Storm, a WNBA franchise whose popularity
ranks somewhere between venereal disease and drought.
And now, the autopsy is going to be ugly.
Like many small-city franchises, the Sonics have not turned a
profit in the last few years. Owners cited what they believed to be
an unfavorable lease of KeyArena to the team by the city of
Seattle. After the city refused to release the Sonics from their
lease or renovate or replace KeyArena, the team was sold to a
consortium of Oklahoma City businessmen led by Clay Bennett — who
immediately threatened to relocate the team if the city did not
replace the stadium.
Seattle fans saw the writing on the wall early on. Oklahoma City
had hosted the Katrina-displaced New Orleans Hornets and proved
they could sell out an NBA arena in recent years. The municipal
mandarins set aside over 121 million greenbacks to renovate the
Ford Center.
It didn’t help that at the same time Bennett and NBA
commissioner David Stern were reassuring Seattle fans they were
doing “everything” they could to keep the team in their home, new
co-owner Aubrey McClendon blurted out the
truth: “We didn’t buy the team to keep it in Seattle; we hoped
to come here [Oklahoma City].”
Worse: red ink had nothing to do with it. “We know it’s a little
more difficult financially here in Oklahoma City,” McClendon
continued, “but we think it’s great for the community and if we
could break even we’d be thrilled.”
A SAVVY CORRESPONDENT pointed out to sportswriter Bill Simmons that
the Sonics are moving from a city with a population of 3.2 million
people to one with a population of 1.2 million. Combined with other
franchise relocations in the past decade, the NBA has shrunk the
population it reaches by 5.3 million.
It turns out that NBA owners are an odd group — many are
uninterested in profit, or use their franchises as loss-leaders.
The Maloof Brothers seem to have acquired the Sacramento Kings in
order to impress women at their casino in Las Vegas. Mark Cuban,
the bartender cum billionaire, made the Dallas Mavericks his
personal hobby.
The consortium of Oklahoma City businessmen didn’t see a
cash-cow in the team itself. Rather they saw themselves
entertaining their clients in luxury boxes in the Ford Center. And
they saw in their future a long series of articles touting the
revitalized arena as the capstone in urban development plans. With
visions like that, it’s hard to blame them.
And yet, we’ve seen this all before. Sports franchise in
second-tier media market tires of luxury-box deprived arena, owners
hold taxpayers hostage for new one, city responds that it can
hardly pay for schools and teachers let alone subsidize a billion
dollar industry. Team leaves.
MERELY SAYING TO Sonics fans, “it’s just business,” will not
suffice. Sports franchises are more than the sum of their assets,
contracts, and the price of a hot dog. Sports are not entertainment
in the way that movies or television are.
Sports franchises help form the identity of a city. Spectators
share in the glory of their team, and participate in their
achievements vicariously.
In this case, the Sonics gave their fans, and their city
memories of Lenny Wilkens, Archie Clark, Detlef Schrempff, the I-5
rivalry with Portland, Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp, “Jesus
Shuttlesworth” and the promise of Kevin Durant.
Recognizing this, a group of local businessmen is trying to bring the Sonics
back from the dead. But commissioner Stern has poured cold water on
this effort (“There is no miracle here”) and the Oklahoma
businessmen seem utterly determined to keep the team.
Worse, they refuse to take The Storm with them.
