Franchise that represents everything wrong

D

dangdirtysooner

250+ Posts
"Oklahoma City, a franchise that represents everything wrong with professional sports." - Jonathan Tjarks, SB Nation.



This guy had other golden nuggets of insight in that article such as, "The NBA barely survived the 1980s, when the Boston Celtics and L.A. Lakers played in several NBA Finals that small-market fans from around the country refused to watch as a matter of principle." The popularity of the NBA actually skyrocketed in the 1980s...

So, am I biased, or is this guy just an idiot?


Lebron James/Miami Heat, Kentucky AAU Revolution
 
The article was a somewhat difficult read, since it was filled with some seemingly absurd opinions regarding the NBA draft and salary cap. He apparently thinks that all the best players should go to the highest big market bidder and have a handful of teams play for the title every year.

Yeah, I think the guy is an idiot.
 
As a person who lived in the Seattle area from 1998-2012, I find his observations about the Sonics/Thunder to be accurate. As soon as Bennett bought the team, I pretty much saw what was coming--as described in the article. Hire PJ Carlesimo as head coach--not exactly famous as a player's coach. Trash the team to get better draft picks, while at the same time alienating the Sonics fans with a bad product on the court. Move the team as soon as possible, dump Carlesimo now that the team isn't in Seattle anymore, and be able to put a good team together in Oklahoma quickly because of all the great draft picks and a lot of salary cap room.

Some of the other things that Bennett did included changing the flagship radio station of the Sonics from their longtime station to a station with a much weaker signal. Driving around Bellevue, right across Lake Washington from Seattle, and I couldn't pick up the station. (I picked up the previous station from 30 miles away.) He also wouldn't allow any of the players to do radio interviews with the former flagship station, which at the time was the only sports talk radio station in the Seattle market.

When Bennett decided to leave Seattle with two years left on the Key Arena lease, the city took him to court. The discovery process turned up a lot of dirt. Bennett was in email contact with David Stern within mere months of buying the team, asking how to expedite the move of the team to Oklahoma. He publicly talked about possible sites for a new arena in Bellevue and Renton, only to have the owners of the sites say that nobody had talked to them and they already had other plans for the land. The city also asked the owners how much they planned to contribute to a new arena, and they never got an answer from them. Meanwhile, Aubrey McClendon (a minority owner) got fined for saying publicly that they didn't buy the team to keep them in Seattle. There was a lot of other stuff that I can't remember, but it didn't paint a pretty picture of the new owners.

Ultimately, the case went to trial to try to prevent them from moving the team before the Key Arena lease was up. I thought the proceedings went heavily in Seattle's favor, although it wasn't a slam dunk. Weeks passed and, on the day that the judge was to announce her decision, they announced that the city had accepted a cash settlement to pay off the bonds on Key Arena in exchange for letting the team leave. So the local politicos, who weren't planning to build a new arena in any case, settled for the easy money to get Key Arena paid off.

Of course, none of this would have happened if Howard Schulz hadn't made the bonehead decision to trust a group of Oklahomans (who'd previously made overtures to try to bring another franchise to Oklahoma City) who everybody else knew had no intention of keeping the team in Seattle.

Anyway, that's my two cents.
 
HornDawg, Howard Shultz cannot possibly be that dumb not to know exactly what the ownership group was going to do. Everyone knew. Even fans of the Sonics knew and no one did anything. All they had to do was show up to games. The fans didn't support the team. Somebody else wanted the team. That's business.

Don't tell me they didn't support the team because they were bad, because they were bad in OKC too and a lot of butts were in the seats in OKC. And look what being bad has led to.

But all of that is irrellevant with regards to the article, nevermind all of that has been hashed, rehashed and then hashed again. He seemed to have a bigger problem with Durant and Westbrook signing extensions because small market teams are destroying the NBA. Then he claimed that large market teams destroy the NBA (his comment about the 1980s...).

I'm still unsure what the point of the article is.
 
I was only commenting on the part about Oklahoma City representing everything wrong about professional sports. I don't much follow the Seattle sports scene closely these days, having moved to the San Francisco Bay Area early this year.

I opted to give Schulz the benefit of the doubt, since he said that the previous ownership group was split on selling to Bennett, but Schulz claimed that Bennett promised him (not in writing, of course) to do everything he could to keep the team in Seattle. That assurance was purportedly what allowed the sale to go through. Many Sonics fans felt that despite what Schulz claimed, Schulz actually sold the team to Bennett to get back at the local politicians for not renegotiating the Key Arena lease, much less putting together a plan for a new arena. The lease at Key Arena was a guaranteed money-loser because of the rise in the salary cap over the years and the lack of luxury boxes, meaning playing to full houses of Sonics fans at Key Arena wouldn't have made any money for the team.

I understand the concept of business decisions. I also understand the concept of doing everything you can to alienate a team's fan base, which Bennett did.

As for fans in Oklahoma City filling the arena, gee, that's a surprise--your first major league franchise, and you fill up the place. I don't have anything against the fans of Oklahoma City--they've done a great job of supporting the team. Of course, as I said before, they had the benefit of a lot of high draft picks and a lot of salary cap money as the result of Bennett's doing everything he could to put a bad product on the court in Seattle. As soon as it was obvious what Bennett was doing in Seattle, I predicted that the team would move sooner than later to Oklahoma and that they'd be a top-four Western team within two or three years of moving. You didn't need to be Nostradamus to see it.
 
This is an article that supports players and the fans of the game. It seems like an anti-ownership and anti-league stance that sees the Thunder as representative of the dynamic that allows the league and owners to collude against the interests of fans and players (Durant is painted as a player whose talent is overblown a tad in order to make him the anti-Lerbon who, because he is the spearhead of a movement empowering players rather than the owners or the league, is being trashed directly after being the league's posterboy for a number of years -- in short, Durant is painted as a sort of mum-mouthed flack for interests with whom the author has a beef).

He makes some good points and demos a command of the dynamics of some subtle issues. It is a murky piece in part because he is staking out some positions that no one else has really sewn together. He seems to both attack a small market team while also saying that the league suffers without such. That's because he wants the players to get more, the fans to get more, and the league and the owners to get less, so good players going to big markets means more power for the players and a league that is hobbled over time by dwindling interest from non-big market locales.

I think he wants to see the league falter, or at least he wants to see the players circumvent the way the rewards of the league are divvied up.

I want to see Lebron fail because he ****** one of my teams. Other than that, I think the author's positions are sound and forward-looking.
 
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