Sacramento Kings moving franchise to the OC, CA.

The Maloofs tried to tank the Kings to the level where they had to move. They gutted the team that brought them the only decent years they had since they moved to Sacramento, and got almost nothing to show for it, but they kept raising ticket prices.

It's always been my belief that they did this with the hopes of making the team so bad that the city would never agree to a new arena and then they'd have to move. When the city did agree to build a new arena, the Maloofs squelched on their agreement with the city.

How many owners go 0 for 3 while trying to move the team? It's just insane, and I could not be happier that the asshole brothers are now out of the NBA.

 

Was David Stern taunting Seattle? At the press conference announcing that the Board of Governors voted down the Kings' move, his first comment was: "This is going to be short for me. I have a game to get to in Oklahoma City." Many Seattle scribes saw it as a putdown.

http://nba.si.com/2013/05/16/david-stern-seattle-super-sonics-oklahoma-city-thunder-media-memphis-grizzlies/

Dick move.

 

Stern would never do something like that intentionally...

They call him Dr. Evil for a reason.

 

Winnipeg was smaller, but they didn't sell out.

For the first several years the arena in Phoenix only had 12,000 seats with unobstructed views -- the rest only had a view of one goal. They still drew 15k a game.

Maybe Winnipeg should have tried that. What they were doing failed. It was a bad team with little support. (And the "given away" tickets is largely a myth from the cheerleading Canadian media.)

 

I just hope Stern gets one last jab at Seattle by awarding the Kings the No. 1 pick...

 

It was so much more than just attendance in Winnipeg. It was a Canadian dollar that was worth about 64 cents, it was bad ownership, it was a bad economy, it was an old building that needed to be replaced. Attendance was only the tip of the iceberg. That situation has changed a lot since then.

 

I think the Ranadive group will be the polar opposite of the Maloofs. They are well financed; Ranadive is/was part of the group that turned around the Warriors in less than 2 years; and one of the new owners' principles in his business was "treat the employees great and they will perform for you."

 

Just wonder if opting out of revenue sharing is binding. I'm sure other small-market owners weren't pleased Ranadive and Hansen wanted to opt out.

 

What this deal shows is what high stakes professional franchise ownership operates at; the Hansen Group truly lost a $30M nonrefundable deposit. Poof, just like that.

 

It didn't go poof. It's just a down payment on eventually getting a team. The NBA has a few more cities to ruin financially with its extortion tactics (Charlotte, Milwaukee), and once that is accomplished, Seattle will get a team. What Los Angeles is for the NFL, Seattle is for the NBA.

 

Charlotte has an 8 (?)-year-old arena, thanks to the last team plundering. The city will tell the NBA to pound sand if MJ even looks sideways at someone advocating for moving the team elsewhere.

 

Only way the Sonics come back is via expansion, I'd bet numerous paychecks on it.