April 23, 2008

Seattle to NBA: Give us new team, we'll give you Sonics

Looks like two can play the blackmail game: Former U.S. senator Slade Gorton, who is representing the city of Seattle in its lawsuit to hold the owners of the Seattle Sonics to their lease through 2010, said Monday that he'd consider settling the suit if a new team was part of the bargain:

"If a replacement team is part of the package, of course we'd talk. My goal from the very beginning has been to have a team. Revenge, I'm not interested in as such. The city has a financial stake in all this. The mayor and I are in complete accord that what we want is a team."

It's an interesting gambit - the NBA certainly doesn't want to face two lame-duck seasons in Seattle, and Sonics owner Clay Bennett is likely to push the league to do whatever it can to let him move the franchise to his hometown of Oklahoma City ASAP. While NBA commissioner David Stern said last year that Seattle wasn't getting a new team if it lost this one, Bennett said last week that the team name and records should stay in Seattle, leaving open the possibility of a Cleveland Browns scenario.

The question then becomes what price Seattle would have to pay to get a new franchise, beyond settling the lawsuit. Both Cleveland with the Browns and Charlotte with the Bobcats had to build all-new buildings in order to be awarded new teams; it seems likely that Stern would at the very least hold out for a publicly funded (or somebody-other-than-team-funded, anyway) major renovation of KeyArena as a condition of a new franchise. (While it would arguably make sense for, say, the New Orleans Hornets to jump at the chance to move to a bigger market, that's not generally how things work under sports cartels.) So that'd leave us back where we started: The NBA demanding a new arena, and Seattle voters and politicians saying they're not going to be the ones to pay for one. The Sonics may leave, but the arena battle looks destined to live on without them.