One year after Sonics' departure, city is only one left to blame

On the anniversary week of the Sonics' departure from Seattle, imagine the trade this way: Elton John and Billy Joel for Kevin Durant and . . . well, some other player on the Oklahoma City roster, none of whom come to mind at the moment.

If the Sonics were in town, KeyArena wouldn't have been able to book the fogy rockers this fall because the NBA schedule, released annually in July, would have had first dibs on the November dates that the concert tours since have booked.

Even though the Sonics played only 41 regular-season home dates, Seattle Center annually had to black out more than 80 event days to provide the NBA schedule flexibility, including April-May playoff dates (youngsters reading this may have to ask parents to explain what playoff dates were).

If sports fans feel ripped off, at least music fans are benefiting. As will taxpayers, modestly.

In accepting a $45 million settlement that allowed the Sonics to scram to the flatlands, there is no longer any debt from the 1995 remodel, which means that Center officials are projecting a small annual operating profit for 2009 -- the first since 2000.

That's despite the fact that event dates are down from 117 with the Sonics to 89 for the calendar year so far.

So it's turning out to be a good deal, right?

Not really. At least not if you believed the opening arguments provided by the city's hired attorneys in the trial a year ago brought to prevent the club's owners from moving the team.

The city claimed that no amount of cash could replace the franchise's value to the city, because intangibles of community pride, prestige, economic stimulation and charitable contributions were valuable beyond measure.

Besides, the city had a rock-solid lease that specifically required the Sonics to perform two more years, for which a buyout was not acceptable.

Emotion backed by logic and law. Sounded good. Except the city apparently never believed its own words and deeds.

After a six-day trial and millions in legal fees, the city caved in the final hour before a decision was handed down in federal court. They agreed to let a 41-year civic institution depart for cash that paid the building debt, two years' rent, the legal fees and a little extra that provided upgrades to small aspects of the building operation.

The fact that the Key is now on solid financial ground should be no surprise. In a report created by the city in 2006 about the impact of a Sonics departure, profitability was forecast, partly because, absent the construction debt, the Sonics void could be made up by booking concerts and events that paid better than the $27,000 nightly hoops lease.

Center officials, and their new building operations partner, AEG Facilities -- they even sold seven suites with no major anchor tenant -- are to be commended for making the Key work financially.

But the focus on annual accounting misses a big part of the picture that was little understood in the run-up to the trial -- and now.

When the temporary building for the 1962 World's Fair became the Coliseum in 1967, its primary purpose was to house sports, specifically big-time pro basketball. When it was rebuilt in 1995, again its purpose was big-time pro basketball (not pro hockey). As a public building on public grounds, profitability was always secondary to the primary purpose as a sports magnet to draw people to the myriad activities of the Center and the surrounding private businesses. The Center was, and remains, the civic living room, not a profit center.

That concept was lost in the growing resentment toward pro sports. Some taxpayers, understandably furious that NBA owners, including the 58-person consortium led by Howard Schultz, dared to say that the Key was economically obsolete in less than a decade, reacted with Initiative 91. The citywide initiative mandated that any new pro sports leases had to provide an annual return equivalent to a Treasury bill rate.

Not only was the requirement unprecedented in American sports, it would apply to the only major sports facility operating in what amounts to a public park, meaning a vote for I-91 put in jeopardy the public's financial interest.

Nevertheless, in November 2006, the initiative passed in the city by more than 70 percent. The vote -- a visceral, yet misguided, response to what was cast as another public subsidy for incomprehensible sports salaries -- was the civic move that doomed the Sonics. It intimidated most politicians who wanted to keep the team for its long-term benefit to the Center and to local businesses.

I still hold the NBA primarily responsible for the departure of the Sonics because of its failure to gain from the 1999 lockout an economic system that worked, and instead now imperils franchises in several markets.

Also failing was the Schultz-led ownership, which needed to put far more of its skin in the game for a citizenry that already subsidized all three major sports a decade earlier.

But those parties are no longer in the game. Only the city remains.

Rather than challenge the premise of I-91 at the time, or later defend the city's interests to the hilt, Mayor Greg Nickels embarrassed himself on the witness stand, then was joined by the City Council in embarrassing themselves by taking a settlement that should have been bigger and could have been obtained in negotiation.

The one good point Nickels made on the stand was when he was asked why the city wanted to keep the Sonics for two lame-duck seasons. He said, "Anything can happen."

Something did happen. Less than three months after the settlement, the stock market crash nearly wiped out the natural-gas fortune of Sonics partner Aubrey McClendon, the big money behind Clay Bennett. With Microsoft chairman Steve Ballmer ready to write Bennett a check for the team as well as a check to the city for half of the $300 million to upgrade KeyArena, the pressure would have been large to sell the failing franchise and keep it in Seattle.

Certainly, Bennett today would claim he'd never have sold, just as Nickels would claim the city couldn't have been certain of a successful outcome in federal court.

What isn't speculation is what Nickels himself said publicly: "The (Sonics) lawyers were paid to make me look feeble, and they did."

Indeed, the image of feebleness has not waned. The city subsequently could not muster the political clout with the Legislature to redirect part of a city tax stream to upgrade the Key and exploit the Ballmer private-investment offer that still stands. If no special session changes that, the city will be denied $30 million in 2013, the penalty Bennett must pay if no team fills an NBA-ready arena in Seattle.

Given the soaring rhetoric the city offered about the value of a pro sports enterprise being more than merely the annual bottom line -- a view apparently adopted when the Seattle Storm was given a sweetheart KeyArena lease around the restrictions of I-91 -- it is remarkable how actions have yet to come close to the words.

In a time of financial despair, anyone can make the simplistic point that many issues are more important than sports facilities. That isn't the point.

The point is to have the electeds either do what they say regarding the public interest, or find the courage to say never mind.