Oklahoma City, In the Press

[jedicurt]

From the article:

Methodology
Using automated weather stations with relatively complete data between 1998 and 2018, we systematically evaluated every daily and hourly observation for 373 stations around the country for all 365 days of the year and computed the number of days per year that met all of the following specific criteria:

High temperature between 65 and 85 degrees
Maximum dew point temperature less than or equal to 65 degrees
Peak daily wind (including gusts) less than 25 mph
Average daily cloud cover less than or equal to 65 percent
No measurable precipitation

yep. for some reason my browser wouldn't let me scroll down the whole page (don't know if it didn't load right or what). went back after rover's post and it apparently loaded properly, and realized that what i thought was the whole article was only the first 3rd of the article. my bad, and i'll admit that

[jedicurt]

but regardless... it's all really subjective, and changing those even slightly causes the numbers to shift dramatically. they say they want it to be where you don't have to wear a jacket... well i know a lot of people who would then say 65 with little to no humidity would be too cool to not have a jacket. so while it is cool that they broke down all of these numbers, due to the fact that what a "nice" day is, is a subjective decision... this list really doesn't mean anything except that if you were to look at all of these criteria, this is the result.

[Rover]

but regardless... it's all really subjective, and changing those even slightly causes the numbers to shift dramatically. they say they want it to be where you don't have to wear a jacket... well i know a lot of people who would then say 65 with little to no humidity would be too cool to not have a jacket. so while it is cool that they broke down all of these numbers, due to the fact that what a "nice" day is, is a subjective decision... this list really doesn't mean anything except that if you were to look at all of these criteria, this is the result.

And what is a nice day for a 25 yr old may not be the same for a 70 year old.

[gopokes88]

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/...cord-shameful/

[Mr. Blue Sky]

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/...cord-shameful/

I would say I am surprised, but...Oklahoma County criminal justice is a hotbed of corruption and has been for decades. One thing not mentioned in the article is how that same "good old boy's club" protected Bob Macy (Looking at you Wes Lane and company) from what would have been certain criminal prosecution had it been in a county with an ounce of integrity. He was allowed to pull his antics, retire, and die in peace without having to face justice for his many botched and targeted prosecutions. Oklahoma City is a great place to live and call home, but if we love it we should make certain the corruption in Oklahoma County is rooted out. OCPD, office of the DA, the courthouse, the county jail, the list is long. It will be quite a job.

[Uptowner]

I hate to always reference John Oliver. But his segments do some really decent investigative journalism with enough immature humor to keep the serious topics from cringing your face off.

This last weeks was on prosecutors and AG’s particularly when it applies to win mentality or forcing innocent people, via threats to stack charges should they decide to litigate, to take pleas simply to prevent bogging down the court system. The crazy amount of people who have been release from death row in southern states, and the remorseful AGs that out them there. The point is that there is no recourse for any shady prosecutor.

The insane fact they cited was that of hundreds of prosecutors who’d been found guilty of concealing exculpatory evidence to convict an innocent man, ONE of them served jail time, he was sentenced to 10 days, and served 4. His victim served over a decade.

[OKC Talker]

It's hard to emphasize how big a deal this is but just like the awards for 21C put OKC on the map in the travel industry, this Bon Appetit article about nonesuch has put OKC on the map in the restaurant community!

https://projects.bonappetit.com/hot1...ction=nonesuch

https://www.bonappetit.com/gallery/o...guide-nonesuch

[shawnw]

https://www.theadvertiser.com/story/...pe/1011005002/

Not exactly high praise. They talk about Toby Kieth's, Ted's, the Outlets, Bricktown, Land Run Monument, and Pinkitzel. Still interesting for the outsider perspective. But Chad should have snagged them up when they were in Bricktown and given them the grand tour...

[dankrutka]

https://www.theadvertiser.com/story/...pe/1011005002/

Not exactly high praise. They talk about Toby Kieth's, Ted's, the Outlets, Bricktown, Land Run Monument, and Pinkitzel. Still interesting for the outsider perspective. But Chad should have snagged them up when they were in Bricktown and given them the grand tour...

They also mentioned... Starbucks. Lol.

[ABryant]

That can't be a legitimate narrator.

[sooner88]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer...-in-a-day.html

[gopokes88]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer...-in-a-day.html

Link to order the book.

Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, its Chaotic Founding... its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis https://www.amazon.com/dp/0804137315..._RxiEBb1XSSEXE

[shawnw]

Next Saturday, 8/25, the author of Boom Town, Sam Anderson, will be at Best of Books in Edmond from 12-1:30. Instead of buying from Amazon, buy the book from a local store and meet the author while you're at it.

https://www.facebook.com/events/215570335913497/

[Swake]

"Perhaps most surprising is the low number of nice days for Hawaii. Isn’t Hawaii a weather paradise? Since we are looking at days with moderately warm temperatures and low humidity, Hawaii dropped way down the list based on the humidity (and wind) criteria. This nicely highlights that no index is perfect."

Honolulu averages 126 rainy days a year. What the index doesn't take into account, is that the period of rainfall is usually short during the day.

[dankrutka]

Just read the article and he's a talented writer. Looking forward to reading it.

[Urbanized]

Next Saturday, 8/25, the author of Boom Town, Sam Anderson, will be at Best of Books in Edmond from 12-1:30. Instead of buying from Amazon, buy the book from a local store and meet the author while you're at it.

https://www.facebook.com/events/215570335913497/

There is a signing Wednesday the 22nd at Full Circle: https://fullcirclebooks.com/?page_id=193&event=1884

[shawnw]

I'll be out of town that day, so will have to catch the Edmond signing myself, but good to get that out there!

[dcsooner]

Just curious what others think of his description of the Thunders move as Purloined ? Not really a flattering description of the move.

[dankrutka]

Just curious what others think of his description of the Thunders move as Purloined ? Not really a flattering description of the move.

I don't think it's accurate to imply the owners stole the Thunder since they purchased the team legally. However, they were clearly deceptive or lying as to their intentions for the franchise, which is evident in their public comments and leaked private e-mails that said opposite things.

[Urbanized]

There are many layers to that though, Dan. One has to recall that there were/are multiple owners in that group, and though they were obviously united in a long-term desire to ultimately get a team to OKC, it is entirely possible (and in fact likely) that they each had different expectations about how that might transpire.

My personal belief - based on following it very closely at the time, voraciously consuming local, Seattle AND national media, reading every word of the Key Arena lease the day of the team purchase, and talking to a ton of people with serious insight on the matter - was that the initial group strategy was to use potential relocation as a threat but not necessarily go down that road. I believe they intended at the time of the purchase to get their foot in the ownership door and to simply ingratiate themselves to David Stern, with few certainties beyond that.

At the time they had just turned down an offer by George Shinn to sell them a minority percentage of the Hornets and retain that team in OKC. But they wanted first right of refusal on controlling interest to revert to them in the event of Shinn’s departure or death, yet he insisted that the controlling interest remain with his family. So they passed, as this would not guarantee a team in OKC long-term.

Stern and the league wanted Shinn out, period. They also felt like the Hornets were unsustainable in post-Katrina NOLA, in part based on abysmal performance in that market PRE-Katrina. So, after the deal fell apart, the league sent Shinn back to NOLA, where they expected him to fail. Doing this also gave the NBA the ability to avoid the sure PR hit that would have come from not returning to The Big Easy.

And if you recall, the league was correct, and Shinn ultimately was forced to sell the team back to the NBA, who in a pretty much unprecedented development owned and operated the team for a bit before finding NOLA ownership that was only possible thanks to the economy of scale brought by also owning the city’s NFL team.

Meanwhile the league also wanted to solve the Key Arena issue, which was that the Seattle franchise was in a building in which - due to what I would deem was poor negotiation - they were essentially paying the mortgage AND rent. The financing had been structured in the nineties to get a remodel done, and it worked great early on but had unintended consequences late. The lease’s balloon-type structure simply made it unsustainable for the team. On top of that, the City got ALL of the building revenue, while modern NBA leases direct much to the team, AND there were very few luxury amenities for more revenue streams, anyway.

Meanwhile the player salaries coming out of collective bargaining agreements were skyrocketing. Witness the fact that Russell Westbrook’s current five year deal ($205 million) is more than TWICE what Michael Jordan made in his ENTIRE CAREER ($90 million).

Unfortunately for Seattle, the Key Arena straddled two eras, and the contract was setting up the ownership (Shultz and the owners before him) for CRUSHING losses. Granted, he’s a billionaire, but that ownership was losing something like $60 million per year, and that was two CBAs ago. It was on track to get much, MUCH worse. So he sold to a group that had a legitimate hammer; the real threat of re-location. But just because they had the POTENTIAL for relocation doesn’t mean that was their original intent. I honestly don’t believe that it was.

Witness Clay’s “sweet flip” e-mail. I strongly believe that their original intent was to successfully pressure the City of Seattle into helping with a new arena (remember the ownership group pledged something like $100 million of their own money). After stabilizing the Seattle situation they could ride out a few years as owners while Shinn imploded financially. After that team was insolvent, they could “flip” the Sonics to local ownership (for a HUGE profit owing to the newfound building stability and skyrocketing team values), and then scoop up the Hornets from the league for fire-sale prices.

They would net potentially hundreds of millions in the sale, the NBA would be absolved of not giving NOLA a chance, Shinn would be out of the league, OKC would be rewarded with a team - potentially still with players like Chris Paul linked to the OKC Hornets days - the league would still have a team in Seattle (anyone who thinks that city was anything but a great NBA market is uninformed and delusional), and the OKC ownership group would be universally lauded as franchise-saving heroes. And other than the improbable Finals run and sustained success the Thunder have had, they would have made more money on paper.

The only fly in the ointment was that Seattle’s leadership absolutely refused to play their expected role in the entire drama. Cities are supposed to be cowed when the NBA says they need to build their franchise or risk losing it. They are perhaps supposed to kick a bit and whine, but ultimately roll over and play ball. Instead they fatally chose to be incredibly arrogant and intractable about the entire thing. They deep down believed that the whole thing was a bluff and a charade and that there was no way the team or league would leave a world-class city for a dusty cowtown whose citizens probably couldn’t even afford to buy tickets. All of this is incredibly obvious in articles, court testimony and admissions since. They just completely underestimated the threat and decided to play chicken.

I believe to this day that if the City of Seattle had simply said “you know, in retrospect this lease is more burdensome to the team than anyone intended - let’s renegotiate it to give some temporary relief and then figure out a cooperative plan for a building that makes sense” the team would still be there. And I’m guessing OKC would be cheering some version of the OKC Hornets. But obviously, that didn’t happen.

Driving this in part was the fact that the citizens of Seattle had sports facility funding fatigue after just building new palaces for the Mariners and the Seahawks, both teams were doing very well, which is not uncommon when teams land in new buildings. The Sonics had dropped in citizens’ pecking order, and the only people who really cared about them were true Sonics fans (the real victims here), of which there were STILL a ton (just as many as there are true Thunder fans, I promise). This story isn’t told in OKC, but Sonics attendance continued to be strong - even without title contention - until the team dumped assets and started the rebuild AND was obviously headed for the door. That is one thing that OKC supporters ALWAYS get wrong in the retelling. Maybe the general population of Seattle wasn’t as passionate about the Sonics - or even sports in general - as OKC folks are about the Thunder, but Sonics fans were GREAT fans. PERIOD.

But immediately after the Sonics puchase, Seattle citizens in general hurriedly passed a referendum prohibiting the City from building a new facility unless taxpayers were guaranteed a PROFIT (a tall order for public buildings, especially traditionally bond-funded ones). So even the Seattle politicians who WANTED to play ball with Clay and Co were working from a disadvantage. Again, Seattle was DARING the ownership to move, because deep down they ALL misjudged the threat as a bluff.

I think the OKC ownership simply reached a point where they thought, “hey, our ultimate goal is to get a team in OKC and guess what? We already OWN a team. And this city as a whole is treating us like crap and we are never going to get anywhere here, so screw it. OKC it is.”

But like I say, there were different personalities in this group. We all know Aubrey (source of the damning e-mail you referred to) was a big-vision guy who by reputation was a hard-charger who often overspent (by others’ standards) to achieve his goals. Makes total sense that he probably had a short fuse on this and switched to an “eff ‘em” position very early on. But if you read Clay’s e-mails they sound like a guy who is thoughtfully navigating a maze and giving Seattle an honest effort. I’m guessing the other owners fell somewhere in between, but it seems like Aubrey and Clay were the leads for the most part, anyway.

The only point I’m trying to make is that I don’t think the whole thing was nearly so binary as most these days represent or believe that it was. I think there were lots of moving parts, including the fact that Stern didn’t totally hate having a cautionary tale to tell future cities who might not choose to play ball, i.e. Sacramento.

I really do think the whole thing would make an amazing 30 for 30 or book if produced by a dispassionate party. The problem is that most who tell the story cannot remove their own passions and personal interest from the telling. “Sonicsgate” did a mostly impressive job of storytelling, and in fact primarily focused on Schultz, Stern and Seattle’s then-mayor as villians. But the producers of that movie had no interest in exploring OKC as anything other than parasitic exploiters, so it was an incomplete telling.

The best possible telling would include much of the narrative in Sonicsgate, but also acknowledge what almost nobody outside of OKC understood at the time; that OKC was on the cusp of major league type city status, that it was more than a cowtown (and actually was not much of a cowtown to begin with) that it had wealthy citizens and a corporate community united in a desire to elevate OKC to the next level, a larger-than-most-knew citizenry with higher-than-anyone-believed disposable incomes - and who were starving for entertainment options - AND an NBA-ready arena that was perhaps most importantly DEBT FREE.

This last part of the story is almost never told by ANYONE (even local correspondents) but the business case for OKC vs Seattle alone (single team in a city of 1.3M vs third most popular of three major league franchises - four if you count the just-landed MLS Sounders and FIVE if you count the WNBA franchise - in a city of just over 3.0M at the time AND the potential of being housed in a paid-for building with premium areas and revenue streams vs one crippled by debt and outdated) should have had Seattle quaking in their Merrells. Instead they essentially dared the team to move. This proved to be a bad strategy.

At the end of the day the Sonics-to-OKC move has far, FAR more complex and nuanced than “purloined.”

[mugofbeer]

Excellent post. Too bad the author didn't think to check on the other side of the story - or feels his version is jucier and will sell more books.

[Urbanized]

Well, the very nature of sports usually causes us to read or tell stories in ways which rely more on emotion than fact. The other team/fan base is aLmost ALWAYS “the bad guys,” even when they are not. There’s always an undercurrent of good vs evil and you have to work to think outside of that. And when you do, the story in never as interesting as the emotional if imperfect narrative.

Wait until I break down how Kevin Durant’s departure was proveably orchestrated by Nike, Roc Nation, Jay-Z Mandalay, CAA, Wanda Pratt, and even Queen Latifah, and had pretty much ZERO to do winning, losing, courage, leadership, cupcakes and beef with Russell Westbrook, but instead was largely driven by the fact that Nike screwed up a pitch to Steph Curry, Nike Basketball was losing money and had just fired its CEO, and neither Splash Brother wore the Swoosh. Oh, and KD probably doesn’t even know and understand this himself.

Sports stories almost always have an emotional retelling when often - increasingly these days at least - it’s just...business.

[gopokes88]

Well, the very nature of sports usually causes us to read or tell stories in ways which rely more on emotion than fact. The other team/fan base is aLmost ALWAYS “the bad guys,” even when they are not. There’s always an undercurrent of good vs evil and you have to work to think outside of that. And when you do, the story in never as interesting as the emotional if imperfect narrative.

Wait until I break down how Kevin Durant’s departure was proveably orchestrated by Nike, Roc Nation, Jay-Z Mandalay, CAA, Wanda Pratt, and even Queen Latifah, and had pretty much ZERO to do winning, losing, courage, leadership, cupcakes and beef with Russell Westbrook, but instead was largely driven by the fact that Nike screwed up a pitch to Steph Curry, Nike Basketball was losing money and had just fired its CEO, and neither Splash Brother wore the Swoosh. Oh, and KD probably doesn’t even know and understand this himself.

Sports stories almost always have an emotional retelling when often - increasingly these days at least - it’s just...business.

Nike had absolutely nothing to do with Kevin Durant going to gsw. Zero zip zilch nata. Nike stays out of those decisions. I don’t care what you heard or who you heard it from, I have heard from both the Nike and kd side. Nike has nothing to with where guys sign. Part of the pitch to players is we’ll sell zillions of your shoes no matter where you go. You focus on basketball, we’ll focus on shows. Some players will ask about market dynamics and Nike gives answers (IE if I go to the lakers how many more shoes could I sell?) but to suggest they influence is preposterous. It’s part of the reason kd didn’t sign with under armour in ‘15, part of their pitch was “when you get back to the DMV” and it rubbed kd the wrong way.

Kd wanted to win a ring.
He was very attracted to the business opportunities of Silicon Valley
His family pushed hard for gsw because they were bored in OK.

[Urbanized]

Disagree. Nike Basketball is the brand’s second biggest division and they were in free-fall after blowing the Curry pitch. They fired their CEO only a couple of weeks before KD announced his “decision.”

Where I do agree with you is that they probably never put ANY pressure on KD himself. All they had to do was let Roc Nation know their preference and let their people (and KD’s family) manipulate a guy prone to manipulation.

There’s a lot more to it, including the fact that GSW and Peter Guber should have been rung up by the NBA for tampering after Mandalay rushed a Wanda Pratt biopic to Lifetime just months before the expiration of KD’s contract, but the fact that Nike Basketball was hemorrhaging money and the fact that they paid KD more than his NBA contract did is where you start.

[gopokes88]

Except for I have family that works very high up the chain at Nike and would giggle at everything you just said. None of it is true. Nike basketball wasn’t hemorrhaging anything. They had lebron who just won a title for Cleveland.

I really respect your postings here urbanized, but you’re just dead wrong on this one. Nike doesn’t interfere with where players go, it’s not how they do business or operate, to the point it’s incorporated into the pitches they make to players. We don’t interfere, you have the freedom to decide where you want to play.