I could have gone to that last game, the one where fans chanted to "Save Our Sonics." That came a year after I'd left. Friends with the team offered me tickets, but I declined because I believed it would only be the last game of the season, not the last of the Seattle SuperSonics. Like the Mariners and Seahawks, which had threatened to leave before, the Sonics would find a way to stay.
And then they were gone. I still have friends, much bigger basketball fans than I am, who have totally abandoned the NBA. In that first season with no basketball in Seattle, I simply couldn't bring myself to watch the league, though I did delight in catching stories about the Thunder's ineptitude in OKC. I've slowly come back to the NBA as a basketball nomad in search of a team, and for the most part I've tried to ignore the Thunder. But now that they're on the verge of joining the league's elite, some old resentments have been rekindled. This should be our team, my heart tells me, not Clay's, not Oklahoma City's.
I wish I could really believe that. But the Thunder, the runaway Northwest Division champions, are not the Sonics. Had Howard Schultz not sold this team to Clay Bennett, the Thunder as we know them—the title contender Seattle fans so desperately wish they'd had—wouldn't exist. Under Howard Schultz and Wally Walker, the Sonics were a team and organization that aspired to adequacy. Maybe they would be good, but they would never be great. Fans could see it on the court and during the draft (Robert Swift and Mouhamed Sene?!); employees could see it in the shabby, penny-pinching way the front office was run.
In Seattle, we wanted to denigrate the Okies so much that we couldn't even keep our prejudices straight. We heard Bennett and Co.'s accents and saw their regressive politics, and we labeled them rubes and idiots. At the same time, we painted them as sinister geniuses who'd cynically orchestrated the theft of our team, with David Stern as their co-conspirator. Resentful Seattleites are like those 9/11 Truthers who simultaneously believe that the government is both totally inept and guilty of perpetrating and covering up an immense terror plot. You can't have it both ways. Either Bennett is an idiot who married into his fortune and lucked into the team, or he's a canny businessman who played the game shrewdly and won.
I have to think he's the latter. I need only look at the organization he's put together to know he's running the club better than Schultz—the media-ordained genius—ever did. It was Bennett who brought in the architect of the club, Sam Presti, based on their mutual connections with the San Antonio Spurs. It was Bennett who allowed Presti to build slowly around Durant instead of demanding wins immediately. Sure, there was plenty of bad faith on Bennett's part during the sale, but at this point it's silly to expect anything else from a sports owner. Caveat emptor applies to us as much as it does to owners. They are running revenue-maximizing operations, and a fanbase is of use to them only to the extent that it makes them money. All we can hope for is that an owner cares enough about his product to give us something worth watching every year. By all evidence Clay Bennett cares about his product. Howard Schultz never did. Maybe that's the ultimate deception in the Sonics' story: A lot of us had the wrong villain all along.
An Insider’s Notes On The Shabby Death Of The Seattle SuperSonics
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Re: An Insider’s Notes On The Shabby Death Of The Seattle SuperSonics
Originally Posted by SoonerBoy18
Only nit-picking in a good way!
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