Sacramento Kings moving franchise to the OC, CA.

I think that keeping the Kings will cost the city about 10 million a year. Basically the city pledged the hotel tax revenues and the money from owned parking and meters to pay the debt. And this is a city that just sweated blood to get a tax increase to stop laying off cops.

As a Kings fan I am happy but personally I think the city would have been better off letting them go. It is not that far to San Francisco for events.

 

Someone mentioned on the Seattle Times site, in a comment, that Charlotte might be a team that could move.

1. No, I hope not.
2. If they lose this team, which I am not sure why they got one so quickly after the Hornets left, they should never get a shot at another team.

 

Charlotte was screwed as much as Seattle was by the Sonics move. The only reason the Hornets stopped drawing was because of George Shinn, and he kept refusing to sell. They regularly drew 20,000-plus to the Coliseum when they had been in town a number of years.

Between Shinn, Robert Johnson and MJ, that market has had some crappy owners.

 

The good folks of Charlotte deserve a Drew Carey.

 

The NBA bent the taxpayers of Charlotte over the chair and ass-fucked them for new arenas twice within 20 years (most recently 2005).

Watch for major breach-of-contract and fraud action against the NBA if the franchise even breathes about moving again.

 

I am/was a Sonics fan, so take this with a grain of salt.

There's a bubble in the NBA. It was created by David Stern, because David Stern doesn't have to deal with the consequences.

David Stern will retire with the league at, seemingly, its apex.

You've got your Heat and your Clippers and your Lakers, your Mavericks and your Nets and your Knicks. It's a league full of teams with artificially high valuations. The NBA, in particular, has ebbs and flows in talent that very much determine its popularity. Five very talented players can make all the difference for the whole league. Right now, it's at an ebb.

Put simply, teams are worth a ton of money because LeBron and Kobe come to town a couple of times a year.

David Stern knows when to walk away. Adam Silver might have a mess on his hands.

Let's look a couple years down the road. LeBron and Wade and Kobe and Paul and Griffin are out of gas. Sacramento's sitting on a bad team playing in front of an 80-percent capacity arena that drained the coffers of the capital of California (Jeffrey Loria, anyone?).

Maybe Oklahoma City is still thriving. Or, maybe, Westbrook's bolted for more recognition, or Durant's grown tired of living in freaking Oklahoma, or Clay Bennett's been subjected to the atrocities of which Seattleites dream, but are too passive-aggressive to publicly speak. Either way, the novelty is gone, and you're left with a crappy small-market team.

Meanwhile, Seattle grows tired of the bullshit. I'll leave it up to the talk-radio hacks to determine whether growing tired of a professional sports league's bullshit is an acceptable emotion for a grown-up to feel. But the Sounders are suddenly wildly popular. Bring in an NHL team, and that team will be wildly popular, too. And enough time will pass for dignity to dictate that Seattle's innate love for the Sonics must dissolve.

I'm not proposing a solution, because the flux capacitor hasn't been invented yet (to my knowledge, given our space-time continuum). Going back in time, keeping the Sonics in Seattle, and finding a more gentlemanly pretext for providing OKC with a team is the long-passed solution.

The Sonics never should have been moved in the first place. It was the height of the Great Recession, and they were a temporarily floundering team - talent-wise - in a rabid NBA market that had very recently dumped money into an ill-conceived renovation of the team's home court, plus the city had just built palaces for its MLB and NFL teams.

Demanding a third palace, as unseemly as it seemed, actually would've happened given another year or two. Proof? Look at the offer now on the table.

Instead, a long-time family owner blundered around and sold the team to a local billionaire with seemingly strong local ties who chickened out about three minutes into the recession and sold to yet another owner who made only the thinnest of attempts to disguise his desire to ship the team off.

I don't think moving the Kings was a great answer. I don't think expansion is, either. The NBA should contract, if anything.

I think - I know - Seattle will get another team. It will happen two, maybe three years from now. But Oklahoma City waiting a couple more years for a team wouldn't have done the damage to the sport that Seattle's wait has. Seattle, a top-shelf NBA market, has irrecoverably lost thousands - let's just say it, a generation - of fans, to David Stern's lack of giving a shit about 2015.

 

All those rabid Jets fans should've gone to the games, then.

For all the problems the Coyotes have had, they've had 11 seasons with a higher average attendance than the old Jets ever had.

 

Attendance is only one factor. And not even the biggest one.

 

Correct. There's the TV market -- advantage Phoenix. There's corporate money - advantage Phoenix.

Nearly every time a team moves people start saying how much the old market loved them and they would have been better off staying put. It's frequently not true. Winnipeg was a mess. Same thing with Hartford.

 

The BIGGEST factor is greedy fuckup owners too cheap, lazy or stupid to run a profitable operation, and decide they have to take the money out of the asses of the taxpayers instead.

Basically we have a batallion of mother fucking billionaires who decide, every decade or so, the taxpayers need to give them another half-billion bucks.

Basically these franchises can succeed anywhere. Anywhere. When they don't, it's on the ass of the owners.

 

What is the difference in the capacity of the respective arenas. Was the Winnipeg arena smaller?

 

Easy to do when tickets are given away or under 20 bucks