They've moving an NBA team to... Oklahoma City?

Cafe Society
21

It doesn’t have as many sky boxes as he wants (and wouldn’t be able to fill). Other than that, it’s fine.

And as we’re still paying for two stadiums that were voted against (twice), the prospect of paying for another sports arena is none to popular.

Pretty much the latter. The Kingdome needed some repair, but it was an engineering marvel when it was built. (Plus it was climate controlled. There are brief moments in April and September where I truly miss the climate control.) But then the trend went away from a big multipurpose, multiseason facility to the highly specialized things we’ve got now.

22

Not to mention “Sonic” Drive-In is OKC, based. Maybe the mascot could be a limeade cup or something.

23

I don’t think the move to Oklahoma City makes much sense either. The only reason the Hornets were able to do so well their first year in OC was heavy subsidies allowed them to charge much less than other NBA teams. Last year, the Hornets’ ticket sales fell by a few thousand in OC. The NBA teams in New Orleans, Charlotte, and Memphis are struggling badly. If the bloom is off the rose now, what’s going to happen after five years of full arena prices for a franchise that almost never goes to the playoffs?
The problem with Key Arena isn’t the facility itself; the times I’ve been there its facilities have been very comparable with Safeco. The problem is when the Key Arena contract was signed, most teams only got the ticket revenues. Over the past decades teams have been able to convince cities to cut deals that also give them cuts of concession and parking revenue.

24

Just FYI, Jacksonville is the 12th largest city in the US, larger then, amongst other places, Seattle (though still a hell of a lot smaller then LA, obviously)

25

I seem to remember the Hornets getting a brand new facility in Charlotte when they first arrived, and they wanted a new facility, what, ten years later? Seems to be the NBA norm.

As others have stated, Seattle is suffering from Sports Arena overload, what with the Key Arena remodel, SafeCo Field and Qwest Field all in the last decade or so. There HAS to be more important things to spend the people’s money on.

The main owner is from OKC, and he heads an ownership GROUP from there. Apparently they had planned to move the team from the getgo (although this isn’t the official ownership line - one of the group broke ranks a few weeks ago and let it slip), and were only paying lip service to actually finding a way to stay.

If they do get to move, they shouldn’t get to keep the name, IMHO.

26

Just wanted to mention that most of the state of Kansas (if not all of it), plus probably much of Missouri (especially in and around Kansas City), will likely “feel” itself to be within the fan-base region for an Oklahoma City team. That wouldn’t translate into very many ticket sales, but it could help keep the thing going for a while, perhaps.

27

You’ve clearly never been to the arena where the Panthers play. It is nowhere near an industrial area. Across the street is the largest mall in the state. Just south of it are some new offices. On the other two sides are the Everglades and a superhighway that runs straight into Miami and up to West Palm Beach. Most of the rest of the area around the arena is some recent housing. South Florida isn’t so much “Miami” or “Fort Lauderdale” but one continuous city that runs a sixty miles long and fifteen miles inland (Broward county where Fort Lauderdale is has about two million people alone) and the National Car Rental Center (worst name ever, BTW) is centrally located.

I lived less than a mile from that spot for over ten years and the Panther games caused regular traffic snarls for me. I can’t speak for your other complaints but this one is completely baseless.

28

Yeah, but that’s deceptive. Largely a function of the fact that Jacksonville is such a geographically large city.

If you look instead at Jacksonville as a metropolitan area, it falls to 40th.

Still higher than Oklahoma City, which is 45th.

29

I have no real opinion on the team moving. I do, however, strongly support use of the term “avaricious poltroon” in daily discourse. :slight_smile:

Sailboat

30

No, Mal, it’s simply not, not in the sense that means anything in this discussion. Jacksonville within its municipal boundary may have the USA’s 12th largest population, but in terms of how that affects the pro sports team there it’s utterly meaningless. It simply happens that the City of Jacksonville has a huge land area (in land area it is the largest city in the lower 48 states) and so people who in Jacksonville are deemed to be living in Jacksonville would, living the same distance from Key Arena in Seattle, be deemed to be living in Woodinville or Renton or Bellevue, which are obviously all part of “Seattle” in any meaningful human geography sense. What matters is how big JACKSONVILLE is - the urban area. Municipal boundaries have no relevance to market size and available fans.

The actual urban area of Seattle has about 3,000,000 people in it. Jacksonville is more like 1,200,000. It’s not nearly as big a city as Seattle, really.

I attended a game there between the Panthers and the Toronto Maple Leafs in February 2004. (To my great satisfaction, the Panthers won.) You’re right in that calling it an “industrial area” is wrong. It’s a commercial area with light industry - hotels, corporate HQs, and the outlet mall, stuff like that. It’s still in nowhere and the night I attended there could not possibly have been 7,000 people there. I paid $7 for my ticket.

31

As popular as all sports (college and minor league pro stuff), are in Oklahoma in general and OKC, I’m surprised it’s taken this long. Maybe they just needed to let all the MAPS improvements* prove themselves to be money makers.
*an ambitious and far reaching city improvement tax program. Several different programs over a decade or more have really revitalised the downtown of OKC and it’s having ripple effects.

32

According to that Salt Lake City is 48th.

33

What matters to the NBA (or at least used to matter) isn’t the city size or even the metro size, but the size of the television and radio markets. Charlotte sports, for example, are broadcast in both Carolinas plus areas of Georgia and Virginia. Designated market areas feature prominently in a city’s chance to land a team. In that listing, Seattle is 14th and Oklahoma City is 45th. Note that Charlotte’s (25th) bid would include broadcasts in Raleigh/Durham (28th), Greensboro/High Point/Winston-Salem (46th), Columbia, SC (81st), and others.

34

Waitasecond…sugar…salt…mayo…THESE ARE MIDWEST FLAVORS!

35

I asked my sports fan son in Seattle for the story behind this. It’s pretty interesting.

Here’s what he said:

Well, this is a long story.

The Sonics might be leaving because of Hurricane Katrina. How’s that for connections? :slight_smile:

Oklahoma City hosted the New Orleans Hornets for a couple of seasons because of the damage in New Orleans. While the Hornets were in OKC, the basketball fans turned out and the team drew a decent number of people. Also, there are no other pro teams in OKC, so businesspeople there would like to become Portland someday. :slight_smile:

A group of OKC-area businessmen (bored after forming Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to try to get Bush elected) bought the Sonics from Howard Schultz (Starbucks guy and local owner). Howard had sold fans on a five-year plan to contention, but bailed after year three claiming the arena was too small and the lease was too bad.

So the OKC owners come here, try to get a new arena built, run into local business leaders still smarting from the owners of the Mariners and Seahawks doing the same thing and surprise, surprise, can’t get a new arena done.

An initiative passes up here (I-91) which will make it harder to raise taxes to build new stadia.

One of the minor owners let it slip that the owners had no intention of keeping the team in Seattle, so now it’s become a multi-million-dollar production of good cop/bad cop while the CEO of the group tries to do damage control.

The owner was told recently that he can’t get out of the lease early through arbitration. The lease runs through 2010.

If the group is able to move the team, it will cost them $29 million ($1 million to each other NBA team owner) and a relocation fee and a settlement fee for getting out of the lease early – if they can. One theory is that the ownership group isn’t that rich and they may not able to afford all of that and may try to make it work here.

Meanwhile, one of the guys from Schultz’s group formed another group and has offered to buy the team. The OKC group says the team is not for sale. The OKC group has also turned down an offer from the Muckleshoot Tribe to build an arena next to Emerald Downs. They gave him a decent offer considering how bad the team has been recently.

So the hope is now that 1) the OKC group will be forced to the stick to their lease and maybe the team will be good enough by then for other people to want to keep them around and 2) the new local group will show the NBA that there are rich people here that want to keep the team here and the NBA will force the OKC group to sell to them to keep a team in this country to play close to the Portland team.

History is on the Sonics’ side. The NBA hasn’t moved an old team like this in a long time and this area has shown it will support pro basketball when the owners don’t screw with it.

Not that I’ve given this any thought or anything. :slight_smile:

36

So you’re basically saying they’re using OKC merely as leverage.

37

That’s what my son seems to think. He’s been following the issue closely for at least a year.

38

I’m really surprised at the vitriol that this is attracting. I haven’t kept up with the politics, but it seems (at its face) to make sense - why keep a team in a place where they are 3rd or 4th place, when they can move somewhere else and instantly become the number one attraction in the state (if you don’t include OU footbal)?

A lot of people here are underestimating the pull this sort of thing has and will get in this area. There simply is not anything to do if you live outside of the metro areas. Even within the metro, watching a movie pretty much maxes things out. Every time I went to a Hornets game, people from out of state would talk about the regular trips they began making into OKC so they could see the game. From what I understand, the vast majority of people in Seattle just aren’t that interested in going to see an NBA game like people here are.

39

It’s going to depend on what you think “they” represents. I don’t think this supposition holds water. The current ownership group legitimately wants to move the team to OKC. It’s more than leverage, and I think it has a better than average chance of improving the franchises value if they move it.

That said, if they can’t get out of their lease on the cheap and they are able to flip the team in 3 years to a Seattle based group at a profit, they would probably take the offer.

I don’t think that the current ownership has any interest in owning and maintaining a franchise in Seattle. Even with a new arena I wager they’d sell the team instead of keeping it running.

Personally, I think the Hornets should be the team moving to OKC instead of the Sonics.

40

If a team moves into a new area why the hell do locals support it, being as it seems so arbitrary?

Go the NY/LA/OC/CHI-TOWN/CLE/KC/Anchorage Rangers.
What the hell is the point?