David Stern, the NBA commissioner is not going to buck (no pun intended) the owners, and the NBA board of governors approved the move of the Sonics to Oklahoma by a vote of 28 - 2. End of discussion.
The justification for their decision is a no-brainer. Look at the facts: virtually every major sports stadium and complex in the country, if not the lot of them, have been built largely with taxpayer money.
Now, upstart Seattle, and Washington state have said enough is enough. You guys are billionaires and you can afford to pay for all if not most of your new facilities.
Meanwhile, the state legislature in Oklahoma just approved a $4 million-a-year tax deal for the Sonics if they will move there.
The monopoly that is the NBA realizes that if Seattle gets away with telling Bennett and his rich friends in the Professional Basketball Club LLC to eat the cost of a new arena, that concept will spread across the country like an epidemic of bird flu.
Cities everywhere will be telling basketball's elite, along with baseball and football owners, to sit on it; pay for your own damn stadiums. After all, you're the ones who will rake in millions of dollars on ticket sales.
Professional sports wants no part of a rebellion against taxpayer subsidies for these poor, downtrodden owners of sports franchises, so they're going to squelch this uprising in the bud.
The owners' message to other cities that are hosting sports teams is clear: If you try to make us pay for a new arena or stadium, we're out of here and you can figure out what to do with your old sports facilities.
Howard Schultz's threat to bring a lawsuit against the new ownership, a move that may be as much about creating good will in the Northwest for his stumbling coffee empire as an earnest attempt to keep the team here, appears to have as much chance of success as a political comeback by Rudy Giuliani or Dennis Kucinich according to a number of legal experts.
I don't necessarily agree with our pudgy mayor on this issue or much of anything else come to think of it, but at the same time, I have to question why these franchise owners are begging for money from cities, counties and states.
Forbes magazine reports that Major League Baseball has an estimated gross income of $4.3 billion a year, the NFL around $6 billion, and the NBA is at $3.6 billion. As they use to say back in the farmland, that's a ----load of money.
Now the owners will whine and tell you how high players salaries are, and how much it costs to broadcast games, etc., but it's their business to manage their costs to make a profit, and not to let salaries and other expenses get so far out of hand that they are at the public trough begging for help. If you can't manage your way to a profit when the government has handed you a monopoly, then you have a problem.
Can Seattle, or any city justify investing in teams and expect to get a return on their investment? That's a tough one, and probably should be left to the guys with green eyeshades and thick lenses. It's said that a baseball team, the most expensive of professional sports, has to take in $89.2 million a year in a city to be solvent.
I haven't run down any figures for basketball, and I've found it more than a little difficult to pin down just how cities make money off a franchise.
Suffice it to say, it's a moot point where the Sonics are concerned. They are on their way to the flatland. Like I say, don't take it personally. It's business.
What Seattle and the state should do is tell Bennett and his friends not to let the door hit them on the way out. Seattle needs to get busy booking concerts, dog-and-cat shows and tractor sales conventions in the existing arena to defer current costs, and start working with Freddie Brown and his team on a new, privately funded arena complex that might bring a new team back to Seattle in the next decade and might even kick off a new era of billionaires paying their own way.
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