Wednesday, we lectured you not to get too attached to your players and used Baron Davis as the example. Had we waited a day, we could have broadened it to include whole teams and used the now mythical Seattle SuperSonics as the linchpin of the argument.
But unlike any other franchise relocation in history, this time the city itself took hush money to let it happen and bragged about it. Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels called it "this deal," and while that isn't very effusive, one could see that he had plans for the $45 million of Clay Bennett's go-away money.
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| Was keeping the SuperSonics not prudent at this juncture for Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels? (AP) |
This isn't the first time, of course, that such cheap trinkets were used to mollify a disenfranchised tax base. The theory that the Cleveland Browns remained in Ohio while the actual embodiment left for Baltimore. The San Jose Earthquakes, the cicadas of sport, got to keep a name and a logo in exchange for losing their actual soccer team, and were promised a new, worse MLS team and a binding extortion demand for a new stadium.
But let's be honest here. Seattle rolled over because the city figured out that $45 million -- and potentially another $30 million in 2013 -- was more than $22 million (two years of lease payments), and because it didn't think the fight was worth it. It didn't think former owner Howard Schultz could win his lawsuit against Bennett (which of course wouldn't have been necessary if Schultz had included a non-relocation clause in his deal), and it wanted the cash without the lawyers' fees.
Period. The colors and history are meaningless without people to attach them to, and there is still no guarantee that the NBA will come back to Seattle because, as David Stern reminded us, the league isn't coming back without a new publicly financed arena or "substantially" rebuilt KeyArena.
So the city got $45 million for a franchise worth nearly 10 times that, for the right to foil the public will and someday build a new arena with taxpayer dough. It is brilliant long-term thinking like that that has marked the entire Sonics adventure, and while it is easy, fun and right to castigate Bennett as just another rapacious, duplicitous hyena, he couldn't have achieved his destiny without the persistent slackjawed nitwittery of the folks at the other end of this deal.
Indeed, never mind the Manhattan Indian analogy. Next to this, our native friends look like a cross between Bill Gates and Johnny Chan.
But at least Seattle has the history, which our experience tells is something that the youth of America value less and less each year. Their version of history is Outkast.
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But at least Seattle has the team nickname, which is as useful as owning the right to the St. Louis Browns, insofar as Major League Baseball isn't putting a second team in St. Louis for the foreseeable future, and if it were, it wouldn't have a pixie for a mascot.
But at least Seattle has the colors, which would be fine if green or gold meant anything to anyone else, or if any other NBA team couldn't change its colors to green and gold any time it wanted, or if not for the fact that the Celtics incorporated a little gold in their own color scheme for their alternate jerseys.
In fact, what the city of Seattle has is memories, and that's all. We don't know how to value that -- only its fans can decide that. But we know the money will be gone in three payroll cycles, the history is just a section of the media guide, the nickname is antiquated (like "Jazz") and the colors don't belong to them any more than they did before.
They sold their franchise short because they determined it wasn't worth the trouble, because they didn't value it enough when Schultz sold it, because they didn't bother to do their due diligence on Bennett, and because Stern did what commissioners always do -- take care of the people who take care of him.
So to Warriors fans who took an unusual devotion to Boom Dizzle, be heartened. Your team may be worse, but what cannot be denied is that it still exists. But don't get too comfortable with that, because you're always one hungry buyer and one lazy seller away from losing it.
Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
