I really don’t why suddenly everyone is surprised that the owners of the Sonics want to move the team to Oklahoma City. Is it so hard to put 2 and 2 together ? Was it so hard to see a few years ago what the goal of the (Oklahoma City based) new ownership group was ? Here are the facts:

• Hurricane Katrina forces the Hornets to play a bunch of games in Oklahoma City
• despite not actually being a local team, just a “rental”, the Hornets bring people to the arena
• David Stern makes it clear that the Hornets will return in New Orleans
• the Sonics are losing money and local authorities don’t want to finance a new arena for them
• people in Seattle overwhelmingly voted against public funding for a new arena for the Sonics

So we have a city that is able to support an NBA team, and a team who’s no longer supported by its current city and looks to be on its way out. The team is bought by a group of business man from the first city. What did you expect it would happen ? Anyone claiming he/she didn’t see this move coming is either retarded or full of shit.

If the NBA didn’t want the team to move, it wouldn’t have allowed it to be sold to Clay Bennett and his gang. But I think David Stern wanted to punish the city of Seattle and send a message to other cities that might think of playing hardball.

And if (former Sonics owner) Howard Schultz was concerned about the team living the city, he wouldn’t have sold it, or, at least, he would have sold it to a local group. Dude is a billionaire and could have afforded to wait a couple of seasons till the lease of Key Arena was over (2010), but my guess is he tried to have his cake and eat it at the same time: he probably hopes that by stirring controversy and playing innocent he can get his the team back AND force the local authorities to fund a new arena.

Once the dust settles, I expect the Grizzlies to be sold and moved to Las Vegas. And by having Darko, Kwame and Jason Collins on their roster, the Grizzlies may well be on their way to the dwindling attendances that would justify such a move.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 5:42 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.