The LOSE loves absurdity, of course, and nothing is more
ad absurdum than the continued (mis)adventures of the Sacramento Kings. This past Monday, the NBA’s Relocation Committee – which consists of the owners of seven other NBA franchises – voted “unanimously” to advise against the Kings being relocated to Seattle for the 2013-2014 season. (I put the word unanimously in quotes because when dealing with matters such as this, the NBA owners like to build consensus and show themselves to be a unified front.) From a purely economic standpoint, doing this makes no sense whatsoever: the Seattle ownership group consists of multibillionaires and would be, if accepted, among the wealthiest ownership groups in all of professional sports; the proposed new downtown arena in Seattle, paid for in a public-private partnership, if done correctly would offer no significant hit to taxpayers while also further enhancing the value of the franchise, which would control all of its own revenue streams; a dynamic new Seattle franchise would be a contributor to the NBA’s internal revenue sharing plan, whereas the Sacramento franchise will always be reaching its hand into the jar. And the Seattle group is willing to put their money where their mouth is, having agreed to a purchase price of the franchise – originally $341,000,000 for a 65% stake – far greater than the Kings are actually thought to be worth. This buy would thus set the value of the franchise at around $525,000,000 or so, which vastly exceeds the record purchase price of an NBA franchise. Imagine what the Lakers or the Knicks or the Celtics are worth if someone wants to pay $525m for the Kings.
THE KINGS!
“I was at my son’s soccer game, which consisted of watching 20 kids moving in a swarm in pursuit of the ball without any direction or sense of what they are doing. It reminded me of some of those Kansas City Kings teams I covered.”
– Kevin Callabro, radio play-by-play man for the Seattle SuperSonics
The Kings are, without question, one of the sorriest excuses for a franchise in the history of professional sports, a vagabond club which has one exactly one league title and called five different cities home, wearing out their welcome seemingly wherever they went. First they were the Rochester Royals, then the Cincinnati Royals, then they became the Kansas City-Omaha Kings, dropped the Omaha, then dropped the Kansas City and relocated to Sacramento in the early 1980s. The Kings relocation to California’s capital gave the city instant cred, gave it status us a big league city and the fans flocked to Arco Arena, bringing their cowbells along with them and establishing themselves as one of sport’s most loyal bases even though they’ve rarely had much of anything to cheer for. Thanks to the skills of savvy GM Geoff Petrie, who assembled an interesting mix of draft picks and seasoned vets, the Kings of the turn of the millennium offered up one of the most exciting, dynamic teams the league has seen, featuring a dynamic offense built around a rejuvenated Chris Webber’s unique skill set – a mix of high basketball IQ sophistication with multifaceted athleticism. They were on the verge of a trip to the NBA finals in 2002 when
this happened.
Which was the single most disgusting display of officiating that I had seen in the NBA since … well, since
this game. Note the free throw count for the Suns.
That Game 7 loss to the Phoenix Suns in the 1992 Western Conference Finals was one of the most bitter defeats in club history, and still makes people angry. It appeared tainted by the fact that the NBA had already been promoting an Finals matchup between Jordan’s Chicago Bulls and the new look, Charles Barkley-led, we’ve-survived-the-1980s-cocaine-era-and-are-no-longer-bankrupt Phoenix Suns. It was difficult even for someone like myself, who is skeptical of all conspiracy theories, to watch 3 Sonics foul out and watch a steady procession to the free throw line by Sir Charles and by Kevin Johnson (remember that name) and not believe the fix was in. This is because the outcome of a basketball game is the among the easiest of sports to manipulate, since fouls called by officials lead to free points to one team and push players closer to disqualification on the other.
And while I’m not about to shout out “the fix is in,” given that it’s common knowledge, or at least common perception, that the NBA’s officials have different sets of rules for different players – the superstars get the breaks, the rookies get no respect, etc. The fact that is assumed to be true by a great number of even the game’s most ardent supporters speaks to a serious credibility problem. (It also doesn’t help that an NBA official
was imprisoned for fixing games.)
The NBA denies this, of course, because admitting something like this publicly would give it all the credibility of the WWF. But when David Stern took over as NBA commissioner in 1984, with the league in a state of near-ruin, he revamped the league through the constant, endless promotion of the league’s greatest players. Now it helped, of course, that two of the games brightest stars – Larry Bird and Magic Johnson – came along simultaneously and landed in Boston and Los Angeles, two prestige franchises with the greatest histories of success and the greatest wide-spread appeal. Then along came Michael Jordan, who landed in big-market Chicago to revamp the moribund Bulls (thanks in part to the knucklehead Blazers taking Sam Bowie – LOL), and, along with the games three biggest icons leading their teams to repeated championships came the salad days – record television ratings and an NBA boom that was international in appeal. So would a league that constantly markets their superstars as the league’s greatest selling point, and depends on their successes for further success of the league as a whole, ever dare allow them to be upended? From a competitive standpoint, the answer should be “yes,” but if you believe that the NBA is little more than style over substance, it’s pretty easy to accept that extra couple of steps Jordan gets on the way to the hoop as business-as-usual.
And the NBA conspiracy theorist would take it one step further – not only does the league care about some players more than others, they also care about some franchises more than others. Dynamic teams in the most dynamic markets make for the best television, after all, and would a Milwaukee-Utah NBA Final really have that much appeal? It’s easy to look at the league and start dividing it into the Haves and the Have Nots – the haves being a list consisting of something like New York, L.A., Boston, Philly, Chicago, Miami, Detroit, Phoenix and Orlando, with the have-nots being everyone else. In that way of thinking, it’s not a coincidence at all that the New York Knicks got the first pick in the very first NBA draft lottery – clearly, it must have been rigged! And you can extrapolate that line of argument out further, to the point where the league’s offices are permitting a
charmer like this to continue running the L.A. Clippers, and stepping in and perpetually trying to keep the
New Jersey Swamp Dragons Brooklyn Nets afloat despite their greatest efforts at self-destruction (or, even worse than self-destruction, of moving to St. Louis! Thanks to
this amazing bamboozling of the NBA, St. Louis will never see an NBA franchise ever, lest you think the league doesn’t hold grudges). If you’re not one of the haves, the league ultimately doesn’t give a shit about your team. They don’t care how many games you win, or how many fans park their butts in the seats of your arena. And if some predatory group comes along and tries to heist your team away, hey … sucks to be you, now doesn’t it? The Oklahoma City Zombie Sonics could’ve very easily been the Zombie Bucks or Zombie Pacers or Zombie Nuggets. Seattle just happened to be the club for sale at the time.
Now I don’t want to buy into ANY of those notions. I don’t believe the games are fixed or that the draft is rigged (were that the case, San Antonio wouldn’t have struck gold twice), or that the league office goes about manipulating the outcomes. But then you watch a game the Phoenix Suns shoot 64 free throws in Game 7 of the Western Conference Finals against some group of misfits out of the forests of the Northwest, and start to wonder if the skeptics and conspiracy theorists have a point. And then you watch
this – seriously, go to YouTube and watch this garbage once more – a game so dubiously officiated that the California Attorney General threatened legal inquiries, and you start to wonder about the entire structure of the league, because any organization that would permit something as seemingly blatant a go at match fixing as that should have ZERO credibility as a competitive enterprise.
And given that they are kindred spirits in the “We Got Jobbed By the NBA” club, this should, in theory, make the cities of Sacramento and Seattle kindred spirits. But here the two cities are in 2013 pitted against one-another, trashing each other, trying to make themselves look good in the eyes of the league. And when I say “the league,” I mean Commissioner David Stern, of course, because what he says is the rule. He will occasionally trot out the line “I work for the owners,” when it suits him, but the vast majority of owners in the NBA owe it to Stern granting them the right to own a team. He is the kingpin of the cartel that is the NBA. If he wants something done, it is done.
And really, you have to look at all professional sports in America as cartels, simply because they are entitled to act as single, central entity with franchises. This is in stark contrast to, say, the English Premier League which I referenced in
this previous post.
There are 20 clubs in the EPL, but the number of actual professional clubs in Great Britain is far more than that – there are 92 clubs in the four divisions, and countless more semiprofessional sides in various regional leagues below that. Football leagues in Great Britain (and, indeed, in most of the world) are essentially loose associations of clubs which have grown organically over time, many of whom were originally neighbourhood associations or interest groups (the juggernaut that is Manchester United, for example, started out as a football club for railway workers). Membership in the highest strata of the game is, in fact, open to the highest levels of sport, as it is entirely performance based.
Suppose the powers that be here at IN PLAY LOSE HQ decided to start a professional football club in, say, Aberystwyth. (There, I’ve now given myself license to say Aberystwyth repeatedly.) Was IN PLAY LOSE F.C. to continue to earn promotion through on-field performance, year by year, we would move into higher levels of play. Doing so isn’t easy, of course – with each promotion comes the need for more financial commitment and superior club management – but the opportunity is there to rise through the ranks. If IPLFC keeps winning, we keep movin’ on up.
There is also a certain level of Peter Principle to all of this, in that a club is ultimately promoted to the level of its own incompetence. So let’s say that IN PLAY LOSE F.C. charges its way through the multi-tiered English League, much to the blessing and joy of the people of Aberystwyth, but the reality is we are still a small club and the XP The Divine Ruler Football Grounds doesn’t have that large of a capacity (we are based in rural Western Wales, after all), so maybe we don’t have the resources to compete with the Manchester Uniteds and Liverpools and Arsenals and get sent back down to League One in short order. Well, that happens. But we still have some decent finances here, and we can field a team that can beat on the Ipswich Towns of the world in Division 2, and be pretty successful at that. The club has found a level at which it can be comfortable. That possibility exists in the multi-tiered structure. Everyone has opportunities.
This structure also prevents franchises from being godfuckingterrible for decades on end like you see in the U.S. with teams like the Cubs and the Lions and the Arizona Cardinals, keeps the quality of play high at the top (since top players inevitably gravitate to Division One), and there is always an infusion of new talent and new ideas into the leagues as clubs come and go. Win and you’re in, suck and you disappear back to a level where maybe you won’t suck anymore. And if you
really screw things up and go broke, go into “administration” as they say in the U.K., you can just start again at the lowest level and work your way back up again. (Witness the oddity of Rangers, the most dominant club in the history of Scotland, toiling in Division Four this year after going broke.)
Suffice to say, it doesn’t work this way in the NBA, or in any other professional sport in North America, all of which are based upon the model of Major League Baseball, which has an antitrust exemption dating to the 1920s – a rather bizarrely narrow ruling at the time which has held up somehow as precedent over the years. The three other major sports leagues have structured themselves in a similar fashion … and then quickly rewritten their charters and bylaws any time the spectre of antitrust litigation gets waved in their direction. In essence, the leagues operate as cartels, offering up new franchises when it suits them, but keeping a tight control over the number of franchises available. This is done, in part, to control the supply in this world of supply and demand, thus driving up the value of the franchises on the open market. And we, the public, we eat this stuff up, loving the competition and the contests. We eat this stuff up. And we develop bonds with our local franchises, we buy tickets to the games and jerseys with our favorite player’s number on the back. We even refer to it in third person, as if we are a part of the team. (I just did that the other day, in fact, taking about the Giants – “the Arizona Diamondbacks must hate us right now.”)
But this is a cartel we’re dealing with here, and when you’re dealing with a cartel, the junkies ultimately have no real sway. The entire success of the NBA is, in large part, predicated on the idea that you’ll keep going to the games, that you’ll keep showing up and being fiercely loyal even if your team stinks year after year. Loyal to the point where you and your fellow citizens of your city will pony up untold amounts in tax revenue to finance their business. It’s been estimated that the NBA receives as much as $3,000,000,000 annually in the form of public subsidies – tax breaks, revenue concessions, and municipalities picking up the tab for the stadia in which they play. And that’s where your ‘loyalty’ is tested (another hallmark of cartels – loyalty must be absolute or the punishments are severe). You are your collective citizens of municipalities must finance new arenas, in the end, because there are only a finite number of franchises, see, and the demand for those franchises is greater than the supply, so if you don’t want to go along … well …
This sort of thing can happen. RIP Seattle SuperSonics.
It’s at this point that I should disclose, yet again, my personal biases in all that I am saying within this essay: I was a season ticket holder for the Seattle SuperSonics. If you’ve all done you’re homework and watched this documentary, you’ve come to know the sad story of how the Sonics ceased to be. And I’ve turned my back on the NBA ever since that happened, having watched a grand total of
two NBA games in their entirety since 2008. One of those would be the last game of the NBA finals a year ago, in fact, which was a chance to engage in some
schadenfreude while watching the Zombie Sonics, aka the Oklahoma City
Blunder Thunder, have their heads handed to them by the Miami Heat. The other was Game 6 of the NBA Finals the year previous, when those same Heat were defeated by the Dallas Mavericks, whom I like, in large part, because of owner Mark “Your Fucking Game is Rigged” Cuban, one of the few owners with the stones to challenge the league hierarchy, and one of the two dissenters in the 28-2 vote by the NBA which permitted the Sonics to be moved to Oklahoma City. (I would give the other dissenter – Paul Allen, who owns the Portland Trailblazers – some props as well, except that I can’t really do that because, well, because Blazers.)
It’s been hard for me to stay away, because I’ve always been a basketball junkie, willing and able to watch pretty much any game, at any level, between any teams. Men? Women? Doesn’t matter. Pro? College? European? Sure, bring it on. I was always willing to overlook what I perceived to be a flawed and unscrupulous business, because I love the sport and loved the team that I had season tickets for – the Sonics of the early 1990s being a bunch whose unofficial motto was “play crazy,” a volatile collection of insanely talented players with a mad genius of a coach in George Karl who, when on their game, were as good as any team I’ve ever seen. And I remember the building in Seattle, how it was LOUD and extremely intimidating to opponents, the lower bowl of the seating designed to provide the fan with the best view of the action, the ability to make the most impact on the game, and the best entertainment experience imaginable.
Which was exactly the point. KeyArena, the old Seattle Center Coliseum, was essentially custom-remodeled to the specs of the Seattle SuperSonics. It was basically built to order for the Sonics in 1994 and received
a sterling review at the time.
And yet here came the Okies in 2008, stating they’d need a new arena to compete when the old arena hadn’t even been fully paid off. The residents of the city of Seattle and the state of Washington, having ponied up for the Sonics in 1993, had done so again to build a new ballpark for the Mariners (
and you see what $500,000,000 gets you) and done so again to build a new stadium for the Seahawks, and people were tired of doing this again and again and again and not seeing greater returns on their investments. At least not obvious returns, anyway – there has been quite a bit of debate about the actual value that building sports venues brings to a community. Some studies look at it straight-up, dollar-for-dollar, and question the actual benefit. Other studies take the approach that the benefits are nuanced, that being a “big league” city improves the tourism biz, the convention biz, raises the city’s profile. But in the end, it becomes hard to justify the constant, continuous outlay of public funds for what is, essentially, an exclusive and exclusionary business for a tight circle of elites and little more than a passionate pastime for everyone else.
Me personally, I don’t have any real issue with the use of public funds for such projects – I appreciate the entertainment offered in such venues, and believe that having such opportunities improves the quality of life – but I can certainly understand others’ reticence at doing so.
The Citizens for More Important Things was a group founded specifically to thwart the use of tax revenue for the purposes of building sports stadia. I personally have always thought of the group as a bunch of bombastic, bloviating NIMBYs, but they were successful in leading the drive to pass Initiative 91 in the city of Seattle, an ordinance that prohibit Seattle from supporting teams with city tax dollars unless such investments yield a profit on par with a 30-year U.S. Treasury bond – essentially, it bans the practice of financing sports venues with tax money, viewing it as being akin to corporate welfare.
OK, I can see the logic in this, even if I don’t agree with it and would’ve voted no had I still been a resident of the state. But if you’re a business like the NBA, and essentially dependent on public subsidies to prop up your entity, I-91 is a patent rejection of everything about the way you do business – even if it should be abundantly obvious that your business model is completely, utterly flawed. Suffice to say, this hasn’t gone over well with David Stern, who
comes off surprisingly petty for someone of his status.
I really hate that guy. The man is the the walking definition of “Napoleonic Complex.”
I hate the NBA because the league and the team I had grown up rooting for turned it’s back on the city whose fans adored it, packed up and moved to Oklahoma City. I hate David Stern and that carpetbagging sleazebag Clay Bennett and his wholly despicable sidekick
Aubrey McClendon. I hate the politicos in the city of Seattle and the state of Washington who essentially sold out the city. I hate Howard Schultz for selling to these bozos and would boycott every one of his 116,000 retail outlets were it not for the fact that I’m ALSO ADDICTED TO COFFEE! ACK!
But I don’t hate
the game. If anything, I have found this resurgent Golden State Warriors team to be rather exciting. There are few things in sports – in life, even – as beautiful as watching Stefan Curry shoot a basketball. (Hyperbole? Perhaps, but this Golden State Warriors team is like crack to a basketball junkie like me. I may have weaned myself off but I’ve never really quit. I’ve just stopped. Big difference.) It’s possible that the W’s could ultimately restore my faith, at least somewhat, although I’m going to be leery of the league and will never consider it legit until the league returns to Seattle. Which seemed likely up until a few days ago, as the Chris Hansen group, having spent 3 years and about $100,000,000 putting into play their plans to bring the NBA back to Seattle, were poised to acquire a 65% stake in the Sacramento Kings from the Maloof brothers.
Aah, the Maloofs. Good New Mexican lads, the Maloofs, a family of beer distribution magnates who have also dabbled in Albuquerque-area politics and ultimately branched out into the world of Las Vegas casinos. They loved the glitz and the glamour of owning a franchise in the most stylish and trendy of American sports, and with the Kings ascension in their early tenure as owners, they seemed like they were the toast of the town.
But it would appear the Peter Principle applied to the Maloof Bros. investment strategies as well. Their Palms Casino venture collapsed, they’re heavily in debt, and they have one major asset left – the Kings, who have slowly disintegrated for a decade now as
Edmonton Disease has started to creep in. The fans of the Kings, who’ve packed Arco Arena for decades (and I refuse to call if whatever the hell it’s Sponsor du jour name is) and have generally had to put up with a lousy product, did nothing wrong in any of this, of course. It isn’t about them anymore. It’s about their owners recouping their losses. Professional sports in North America are always sold to the public as being something of a civic trust, but that only goes so far as the owners not being able to make far more money elsewhere. Thus up came the demand from the Maloofs for a new arena to be built, which was voted down rather understandably in the middle of an economic depression. After that came a dimwitted plan to move the franchise to Anaheim which fizzled, then talk of moving to Virginia Beach (which seemed to be news to everyone in Virginia Beach), and finally, having poisoned the waters for themselves in Sacramento and created impossible animosity, the Maloofs decided to sell to Hansen and his assemblage of Seattle businessmen with pockets about as deep as the Marianas trench:
 |
| graphic courtesy of the folks at Sonics Rising |
It would stand to reason that the NBA would want people like the Hansen group in their midst, and would want to rid themselves of the Maloofs. The greatest kink in the armor of such seemingly iron-clad entities are rogue owners who act like idiots. As Al Davis proved in his (mis)handling of the Oakland/L.A./Oakland Raiders, the leagues themselves don’t actually have much power to prevent their members from acting badly. In fact, they have to ultimately go along with some bad ideas and they pay the consequences for it. This whole mess involving Seattle and Sacramento, ultimately, is the end result of a decade’s worth of bad decisions by the NBA, a chain of events which would make you question just how great a commissioner Mr. Stern really is. Consider:
• The NBA approves the move of the Charlotte Hornets to New Orleans. The Hornets were an instant success in Chrlotte, selling out the league’s largest building, reaching a playoff level reasonably quickly and establishing fashion trends in the process (ooh, teal, pretty), but they were owned by George Shinn, who turned out to be cuckoo bañanas and went about poisoning one of the sport’s great oases. He was lured to New Orleans by all sorts of promises that the city of New Orleans and state of Louisiana ultimately couldn’t deliver on. (See, it can cut both ways here.)
• The New Orleans Hornets promptly fall apart, to the surprise of absolutely no one.
• The league “feels bad” about how things went down in Charlotte, having left a popular market mainly so as not to undermine one of their own owners (lest they set a precedent of trying to prevent individual owners from doing as they wish), so they award an expansion franchise to Charlotte, which has some new owners and have gone about building a new arena it probably didn’t read, and the end result of this is the Charlotte Bobcats, one of the worst franchises in sports that is presently being run into the ground by Michael Jordan. (More proof that great players don’t make great coaches or administrators, but that’s the subject of another blog.)
• Meanwhile, the flatlining Hornets are now faced with an even bigger problem, in that their home city gets drownd by Katrina. The franchise then relocates for a season to Oklahoma City – a city which positively ADORES them. It seems like an ideal home.
• But the NBA doesn’t want to “look bad,” and doesn’t want to look like a greedy, selfish entity taking advantage of a natural disaster, so the Hornets then go back to New Orleans, where they were already floundering, and continue to flounder to the point where the league has to ultimately step in and by the franchise.
• And once that happens, of course, any ideas about competitive balance and avoiding conflict of interest
go flying out the window, since this unwanted investment is now subject to all sorts of politics and manipulations that wouldn’t otherwise apply. Ultimately, they find a local owner – Tom Benson of the Saints – to take this problem child off their hands, selling at a price – $338m – that, compared to the money being thrown around in Sacramento, looks like a pretty bad deal for the NBA. Benson’s Super Bowl winning Saints were a feel-good story as they brought some joy and hope to a city desperately in need of it. (Never mind that he was often hinting at moving the Saints so as to extort concessions and improvements to the Superdome from local officials over the years. Nah, we won’t mention that. Oh, wait, we just did.) And while I approve of the
rebranding, because Pelicans are cool, I am skeptical of how viable this operation ultimately will turn out.
• Meanwhile, the Okies who stepped up and hosted the Hornets, and probably should’ve had the Hornets after it was over, have gotten themselves in the good graces of the league after their stint as hosts and then go about looking for a franchise to acquire and move to OKC – and are encouraged to do so.
•
Sonicsgate
• The league “feels bad” for the fans in Seattle who supported the franchise for 41 years. (No, actually, the league doesn't really give a shit.)
So now the league has made various degrees of messes in four different cities in this process. The Zombies are impeccably run, to their credit, and have staved off the possibility of
Edmonton Disease creeping in mainly because they lucked their way into landing Kevin Durant with the 2nd pick in the draft. (The 1st pick being Greg Oden by the Blazers, the same franchise that picked Sam Bowie over Michael Jordan all those years ago. Nice going Blazers. Imagine what would’ve happened if those picks had been reversed – think the Zombies would be such a success story? As it is, they’re only as good as the willingness of Durant to stay – a statement not intended to deride OKC but to speak to the true nature of all of this, which is that you’re only as good as the players you have, and wow, this parenthetical is getting really long.) My, what a stellar operation this is.
But, of course, Seattle wants their franchise back. Chris Hansen, the point man in the group to bring the NBA back to Seattle, has already spent 3 years and about $100,000,000 or so on the project, including the purchasing of land downtown on which to build the arena. 44,000 people put their name on a waiting list for possible season tickets earlier this year. 44,000 junkies, just like me, willing to overlook all of this previous ugliness because we love the game and want to see it again.
Suckers, in other words. The more evidence that you give that you want something, the easier that it is to be used.
Which is ultimately what happened to Seattle, of course. Upon attempting to acquire and relocate the Kings, the wheels started to turn in Sacramento where the mayor, Kevin Johnson (there’s that name again), who understands the “quality of life” argument of having professional sports (and also understands the danger to one’s political life upon having a professional sports team move from their city on their watch) has since sprung into action, recruiting a variety of Northern California businessmen to pony up a matching offer to the Hansen group in Seattle, and forcing through, on the third or fourth or whatever attempt, a plan for a new arena in Seattle which will leave the city on the hook for $258,000,000, if not more – some estimates put that figure at closer to $340,000,000. They’ve essentially been walked through this process by the NBA, of course, to which it’s easy to conclude that this fight over the Kings between Sacramento and Seattle never had anything to do with Seattle at all. Because, in the end, the league which is has lived off public subsidies and repeatedly practiced corporate extortion is going to get at least $258m out of Sacramento – which is $258m more than Seattle, where the arena was going to be primarily privately financed, with the balance paid by tax revenues created by the building.
And that matters most, in the end. If you own a professional sports franchise and you’re concerned about the long-term value of the franchise, privately funding your own building is the best way to go. Time after time, this has been proven to be true, including here in San Francisco (first with the Giants and soon with the Warriors), because not only are they successful sports franchises with noticeable brands, but they are also landowners of extremely valuable pieces of real estate, which means controlling ALL the activities in the building and thus controlling ALL the revenues. In the end, if you’re looking at a long-term investment, such a move, while expensive upfront, is really a no-brainer.
But as you can see from my outlining of the Charlotte vortex from before, long-term thinking isn’t exactly the forte in the NBA. It’s much easier to just hold up a city and make them build it for you, and pay for it so you don’t have to. And you don’t want to set a precedent of letting cities off the hook, now do you? If they privately finance an arena in Seattle, and prosper, then who’s to say the cities of Milwaukee and Minneapolis and Memphis won’t just say to the Bucks and the Wolves and the Grizzlies, “hey, it worked out in Seattle, so why don’t you just build an arena yourself?” And building your own building cements you to a community, slams the door on the possibility of using relocation as a bargaining chip. The NBA would much prefer their owners keep their foot firmly entrenched between the screen door and the door jamb – they aren’t necessarily leaving, but there’s always a possibility to depart. And this is the most twisted part of sports in North America, in the end, one which has reared its ugly head time and again. Franchises are desperate for the loyalty of the local fan base, yet have no loyalty ultimately in return. Pretty much every major city in the U.S. has seen a professional sports franchise move to “greener” pastures. (About the only major exceptions I can think of to that are Detroit and Phoenix – and given the perpetual plight of the Coyotes, the latter may not be able to make that claim for much longer.) And I say “greener” because quite a few of those moves haven’t worked out so well. Witness the Charlotte/New Orleans Hornets/Pelicans I referenced earlier, or the thrice-previously moved Rochester Royals/Cincinnati Royals/Kansas City-Omaha Kings/Sacramento Kings, a franchise notable primarily for getting screwed in the NBA playoffs, for being unable to win a championship with a player who averaged a triple double on their roster, and for little more than moving a whole lot of times.
Yet here the Kings were at the center of this heated battle, coveted by one city which has tethered far too much of their identity to it (“You can’t take our Kings! It’s all we have!” has been a fairly constant cry coming out of the Great Tomato) and one city which feels like it was screwed over by the NBA once before and willing to pay greatly for it to return, willing to overpay to the tune of driving up the value of the Kings franchise some $150m or so. This fight over such a seemingly irrelevant franchise is, in fact, an
ad absurdum moment in the history of North American professional sports, a point where sheer madness has taken over. Why would two groups of people spend so much for a business which has, historically, offered so little?
In the end, the NBA has chosen against relocation because they’ve extorted enough from the city of Sacramento to make it worth their while to stay there. This sort of ploy is common enough, but it only works if there are cities which are willing to play along – and cities, wanting these franchises, willing to play the role of stalking horse. The NFL, for years, has made threats about relocating franchises to the vacated L.A. area – even though there has NEVER been a coherent stadium plan, and even though the city has shown no particular interest in either building a new stadium or acquiring a new team. (We W.S.U. skeptics would chortle that, in U.S.C., the city of Los Angeles already has a professional team.) Major League Baseball, meanwhile, has filled in their most prime stalking horse markets in Denver and Phoenix and Washington and Tampa Bay with expansion franchises, and after a wave of stadium reconstruction in the 1990s and through the turn of the millennium, they have found that the tactic of extorting ballpark deals from cities no longer really applies. The Oakland A’s have attempted to threaten relocation, but where would they go? There are no viable markets anymore, not even Montréal, which rightly extends the middle finger after the loss of
Les Expos. The NHL is even worse – having overexpanded and clumsily relocated Canadian franchises in the 1990s, the league finds itself diluted and littered with D.O.A. franchises with no viable suitor cities save for the Canadian cities from whence they previously came!
In making this choice to deny the relocation of the Kings to Seattle, the league is, essentially, banking on the fact that Seattle, as a city, will keep clamoring for its product, much as Tampa Bay clamored for Major League Baseball for decades – an idea which, to me, seems rather foolish on the part of the league. Quite honestly, I think Seattle could learn a thing or two from Montréal at this point, make it a point to extend the middle finger in the direction of the league offices. Why play this game? And last time I checked, I don’t see too many other cities clamoring for NBA franchises at the moment. After the latest round of labour disputes, the NBA claims that the new CBA with the players will allow all of their franchises to be profitable, but that’s unlikely because there will always be disparity, there will always be haves and have nots in this system and conditions inevitably shift over time. And it will be the same group of franchises that are in trouble and clamoring for new arenas and new public subsidies, whereas some of the larger ones have taken it upon themselves to fund their own solutions. The league’s already got a host of problem children franchise and the number of interested cities on the outside seems to be ONE. Take that ONE away and this whole way of doing business doesn’t seem so smart.
But that means no basketball in Seattle in the end, and that makes me sad. And since the city has now been burned twice by the league, why should they carry on. Chris Hansen’s group insists he is pursuing “options” but those options don’t seem terribly good. The new building in Seattle is contingent upon acquisition of an NBA team. This whole plan seems to be going up in smoke.
As for Sacramento, well, good luck. The arena plan, on something like it third go-round, seems rather iffy. Delays and cost overruns are rampant in this sort of thing, and the citizens of Sacramento may be in for some sticker shock when it’s all said and done. There are already lawsuits suggesting fringe dealings going on, and the plan may not fare so well when put to a public vote. If that falls apart or (more likely) takes impossibly long to build, then the franchise is going to start sagging rather quickly and the league will have this same mess on its hands once again. The potential new owner, a software magnate named Vivek Ranadive, is a minority partner in the Golden State Warriors at the moment, which means he’s an insider and the league likes to deal with their own (Clay Bennett was a minority owner of the Spurs before he swindled away the Sonics). He would also be the first owner of a professional sports franchise of Indian descent, and has used the potential of opening up further marketing opportunities in India to pique David Stern’s interest, since making the NBA a global entity has been one of his pet projects over the years. Which is somewhat bogus, in my opinion, because it’s a rather ludicrous idea that people halfway around the world will care about a sport because of an owner. Fans don’t care about owners. They care about players. And the fans won’t care about the Sacramento Kings unless, through some dumb bit of luck, they land themselves a transcendent sort of superstar player, the sort who would actually stay there much as Duncan and David Robinson did in San Antonio, or Stockton and Malone in Utah.
And it’s telling that quite a few experts out there believe the league is using Seattle for leverage, extracting the best sort of public deal out of the city of Sacramento, but no one suggests the league would then turn around and use Sacramento as leverage the next time round were the Kings to leave. This is because when they say “You can’t take our Kings! It’s all we’ve got!” they really mean it. The reality is that it’s pretty much a dead market and will always struggle to compete unless the franchise is impeccably run and/or finds a superstar like I mentioned before. And I mean that as no disrespect to the city of Sacramento, either, which is a decent enough place. It’s just not going to ever be high on the list of free agent destinations. Locals in the know will tell you that if the Kings leave Sacramento, the NBA is pretty much never coming back.
What do the NBA honchos have to say?
"I think some people are surprised at the preliminary decision the relocation committee has made because they say well but look at Seattle. There are
more corporate headquarters, There's more TV households there's the potential to generate more revenue there?
Shouldn't you move a franchise to the market where there is more
revenue? Our response is not necessarily, that if you look at total value over time and brand building and community support that continuity is important."
– NBA Deputy Commissioner Adam Silver
That’s bullshit.
The league stands to make FAR LESS in Sacramento. And while I’ve stated for the record here that I was a Sonics season ticket holder, I can look at the sizes of the markets, the economies of the markets (Seattle’s is bustling while Sacramento’s has struggled with economic recovery, much like the rest of the state where it is capital and in which I now live), and there is no comparison. A well-financed and essentially debt-free Seattle franchise stands to make FAR MORE money, contribute FAR MORE MONEY to the NBA’s coffers, and ultimately be worth FAR MORE – which, in turn, makes every other franchise in the league worth that much more. So by choosing to do this, from an economic standpoint, the league is ultimately devaluing itself, and if Seattle shows the NBA the finger (which is should do), the league will also be losing its prime source of leverage when
the Milwaukee Bucks the next team in trouble starts begging for a replacement for their arena, which was already most likely paid for by a city or a state and, like a car you drive off the lot which immediately depreciated, started becoming obsolete the moment that it opened.
Now, in no way to I advocate franchise relocation as a concept that leagues should embrace. I think it's the worst aspect of professional sports, insomuch that it insulates bad businessmen from being responsible for the results of their bad business practices. But clearly, this is the only way that Seattle can get back in the NBA game. Stealing a franchise from another market makes me feel somewhat unclean, but I would get over it. And if the NBA is going to allow this sort of thing, then they should just do what's best for themselves and stop pretending that the fans of (insert city of choice) have anything to do with it at all.
And from a purely economic standpoint, in a big picture, this decision by the NBA is a damn stupid idea. And thus, the
ad absurdum that is the NBA today, in which a group of businessmen offer to invest, all told, about $1,000,000,000 or so altogether in the NBA, take one of its failed franchises and longest-standing problems off its hands, and the league essentially says “no.”
The league has said all along “one city is going to be unhappy,” but it seems conceivable in the end, and I dare say likely, that EVERYONE is going to wind up unhappy to a certain extent. And everyone involved, in one way or another, seems to have lost their minds. Everyone loses! In play lose! The only way not to lose at this silly, crooked game is not to play.
Wait, is that a basketball game on TV? Turn that up ...
