Are Sacramento Kings moving to Virginia Beach?

**Bellaboo** · 01-22-2013, 01:30 PM

Originally Posted by betts

I wasn't trying to be holier than though, nor to imply that Thunder fans will pack the arena when the lean years come. I hope we appreciate what we have, and I'm glad we wanted the team enough to help out the owners. Hopefully that will translate to better attendance when the team does poorly. I just think Seattle has been given too much credit for being a great basketball city when they haven't had many years of capacity arenas. I also found their attitude towards a new arena unreasonable and their thought that an owner who spends a third of a billion dollars for a team shouldn't ask for public funds to help pay for arena irritating. I think any owner who spends that kind of money to bring a team to a city is perfectly within his/her rights to ask for a public subsidy to build a facility to house them. The sense of entitlement demonstrated by a mid-sized market was pretty shocking to me. I'm also annoyed by the hypocrisy demonstrated by people who acted as if Clay Bennett was the embodiment of the devil. Now it's OK to take another city's team. I see no difference between what happened in Seattle and what's happening in Sacramento. Both cities were given a reasonable period of time to build an arena, and both were warned they might lose their team if they didn't.

I've read a few boards and comments on ESPN about this and the Seattle fans are claiming this is different. This it's not the same, that they are telling them up front about the move and that makes it all okay.....a bunch of hippos is what they are. Clay gave them 1 year to get an arena deal started and it was voted down within their political leadership, both city and county wide.

The one I have a problem with is how they claim Clay 'stole the franchise'. The last time I read anything about it is that it was bought for $350 million, not stolen. An owner has the right to do anything with his team as long as the league approves. Now the Baltimore Colts were moved in the middle of the night, not the Sonics. It was just sour grapes from a vocal few, as most people up there could care less. They were tired of building facilities for the Seahawks and Mariners and showed very little if any support for basketball.