"This is the second-most exciting indoor sport, and the other one shouldn't have spectators."
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-- Dick Vertlieb, Seattle SuperSonics first general manager, on pro basketball
FOR THE FIRST time in 42 seasons, the NBA began without a team in Seattle.
Not a surprise. Still unbelievable.
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Saw Lenny Wilkens the other day and asked him to talk about it.
"I can't," he said. "I'm still not over it."
The most iconic Sonic remains a little catatonic. So are many fans.
One of them, Bruce Harrell, is a former All-Pac-10 linebacker for the Washington Huskies and now a member of the City Council. He was a reluctant part of the unanimous council vote to accept a settlement of the lawsuit that allowed the club's owners to move the team to Oklahoma City, where Wednesday night it opened play as the Plunder ... um, Thunder.
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A few weeks earlier, Harrell was honored as a Huskies legend at the end of the third quarter of the UW's blowout loss against the University of Oklahoma when he was a little startled by the eruption of applause from an already dwindling Husky Stadium crowd.
"A friend kidded me," Harrell said, "that they were Oklahoma fans thanking me for giving them the Sonics."
Whether Harrell was being mocked or celebrated, the friend's remark about "giving them" the Sonics resonates on a larger level.
Did we "give away" the city's oldest sports franchise? Or did circumstances combine to doom it, no matter what city government did?
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Sure, the city received $45 million from Clay Bennett and his pals -- cash that suddenly looks even better in light of the stock-market shrivel that decimated one of Bennett's partners, Aubrey McClendon -- to escape the lease, plus a chance at another $30 million in five years if another NBA team hasn't occupied a renovated KeyArena.
But during the federal civil trial regarding the team's final two years of the lease, the city argued eloquently that the Sonics' value to the city was so important that it could not be replaced by money. Having sat through nearly the entirety of the trial, I was persuaded that the city was convinced of the Sonics' intrinsic worth apart from financial impact, which has always been small in a market the size of Seattle.
Then the city, minutes before U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman was to deliver her decision, turned on its own argument, settled and took the money.
What happened?
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The easy answer was the city, already pressured by some constituencies to take the money, knew it was on the verge of losing a winnable case of contract law, in part due to a conflict of interest involving one of the K&L Gates attorneys, Slade Gorton, as well as some weak preparation.
But upon reflection and after conversations with council members and Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis, the argument is plausible that there was no good outcome. The true end of pro hoops in Seattle came two years earlier, when local then-hero Howard Schultz and his partners sold to out-of-towners who, even in the unlikely event they were sincere, had no better chance than Schultz to get public money to trick out KeyArena to new NBA standards.
Three outcomes at the trial were likeliest:
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"In listening to the (city's legal) discussions, the judge could have awarded damages as minimal as $1," Harrell said. "The issue of valuing intangibles is a big part of the court system. Like the liability in a car accident -- no money is worth the pain and suffering, but at some point we have to put a dollar figure on it.
"Frankly, I don't think we achieved what we could have, but we got something and paid a price for closure."
The city also paid a price, at least in some quarters, in embarrassment. Agreeing to let go for cash a local institution from the 14th-largest TV market to owners from the 45th market was bad enough. But the city's effort in court largely was lame.
From the first day, when Mayor Greg Nickels offered contradictory, ineffective testimony, the city did not play defense well against attorney Brad Keller and his Seattle legal team hired by Bennett.
"(Keller's) job was to make me look feeble," Nickels told KUOW-FM in July, "and I would say he did a pretty good job."
Others would argue that the city was right to stand up to the ravenous devil hounds of pro sports. The building was remodeled to NBA specs in 1995, and by 2003 Schultz was complaining he couldn't make money. The fault surely did not rest with the building, but the broken economics of the NBA.
Just as the NBA would not take responsibility for its role, Schultz, team president Wally Walker and others took little responsibility for the decline in team fortunes that contributed to what seemed to many to be an absence of breath and depth to the passion for the team.
In a long story about the move in The New York Times Sunday magazine, forward Nick Collison, who maintains a home here, was quoted as saying, "There wasn't much excitement about the Sonics, to be honest. It said something about Seattle that people there didn't want to believe."
In fact, in contrast to Dick Vertlieb's long-ago sentiments, the Sonics were the third ticket in town behind the Mariners and Seahawks, and perhaps the fourth, given the long history and tradition of University of Washington football.
But the Sonics were the first to ask for more public money less than a decade after getting the first sports-stadium share in the economically flush 1990s. Schultz, Walker and Bennett failed to appreciate how sentiment, and state tax policy, had shifted.
But Bennett's hometown was a place where the civic insecurity was a throwback to Seattle of 40 or 50 years ago -- eagerness for the big time, seeking national attention through sports for a remote spot on the cultural map.
It could be simply that the NBA's time in Seattle had come and gone. Other large cities in the West, Vancouver, B.C., San Diego, Las Vegas, San Francisco (the Warriors are in Oakland) seem to be carrying on without the NBA brand.
That is no solace, however, to Wilkens and the many thousands whose bleak Puget Sound winters were lightened by him and Spencer, Slick, Russ, Gus, Jack, Fred, D.J, X, George, Nate, Gary, Shawn and Ray.
If you have to ask, you won't understand. The mourning period officially began Wednesday night, end unknown.