There is a whole mass of people being excluded from the NBA Finals this year. They got all dressed up for the party, but were denied entrance at the door. And they’re not happy about it.
In the minds of Seattle Supersonics fans, Oklahoma City has stolen a shot at a championship from a city that loved and supported its professional basketball team right up until the day it was packed up and shipped away.
That Cleveland fans are still rooting ruthlessly against LeBron James and the Miami Heat is not new information. It is almost assumed that Cavaliers fans are willing the Oklahoma City Thunder to a championship with the sheer force of their collective hatred for the man who abandoned them for the glitz and glamour of South Beach.
But Supersonics fans don’t want to be left out of all that glorious detestation-driven basketball enthusiasm.
“In The Decision, LeBron left Cleveland in somewhat of an insulting manner and they lost one superstar player. They still have a team there,” said Sonicsgate producer Adam Brown. “In Sonicsgate, we not only lost a superstar player in Kevin Durant, but we lost our entire team, with the 41-year history that’s also been stolen!”
Sonicsgate was a documentary film made by Brown and his friends Jason Reid and Colin Baxter about the sale of the Seattle Supersonics to a group of investors headed by Clay Bennett and Aubrey McClendon that promised the city it would keep the Sonics in Seattle, and then promptly moved them to Oklahoma City.
Of course there are more intricacies to that story involving Sonics ownership, the mayor’s office and various men with deep pockets and sinister minds, but the gist of it is there. It’s LeBron and The Decision multiplied by an entire team.
Dave ‘Softy’ Mahler is a sports radio personality in Seattle, and has spent nearly three decades listening to people grumble about the Sonics on his radio show.
He says the Sonics subject matter has spiked in recent weeks, as fans are being forced to witness the Thunder’s success.
“It’s a huge topic on the radio. We talk about it almost every day on the show. People are venting their feelings everyday on the air. It’s probably the lowest moment for Seattle sports fans,” he explained. “I mean obviously losing the Super Bowl, losing in the playoffs in 2001 when the Mariners had won 116 games in the regular season, that was tough, but watching a team leave and dominate somewhere else is just about the worst feeling I think we’ve ever had in Seattle.”
“People look at (Clay Bennett) and look at the situation and just have nothing but contempt and bitterness…” he added.
Brown, who helped create the now infamous documentary film Sonicsgate in 2009, is still reeling from the “theft” of his beloved team. In fact, words like theft, stolen, pain, deception and anger were all used multiple times in a 20-minute conversation with him.
He’s a true hometown fan, right down the core.
“My earliest memories of the Sonics are the early 1990s when Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp had just been drafted and had started making the playoffs. (I) grew up playing basketball, this has always been a basketball city,” Brown said. ‘We would always go to Sonics games, or watch the games on TV.
“It was the one thing we were allowed to watch at the dinner table. Even those last couple years when the team was terrible and they were intentionally tanking the team for draft picks…I still went to 15-20 games a year.”
Brown isn’t the only Seattle basketball fan to feel so betrayed. A quick internet search proves as much. Brown wanted Sonicsgate to speak to and for every spited hoops head in the area.
“In 2008, the Sonics were stolen from Seattle after a long series of complicated political and corporate scandals that caused the team to relocate to Oklahoma City and as Sonics fans we were just heartbroken and we couldn’t figure out why this happened and we wanted to combat the national narrative that Sonics fans just let the team go and just didn’t support the team and didn’t care about it,” he explained. “We knew that was completely untrue, so we wanted to get to the bottom of the real reasons why the team left.”
The ‘we’ he speaks of represents every Sonics fan that was weeping, or puzzling, or burning their green and yellow jerseys the day the team left town.
Fast-forward four years and the team that was picked up and set down in Oklahoma City is on the brink of a championship. Sonics fans can’t help but feel they should be the ones planning a victory parade for Kevin Durant and Co. through their Seattle streets.
“Ultimately when David Stern hands the championship trophy to the team, he hands it to the owner first,” Brown said. “Every time we see Clay Bennett and Aubrey McClendon sitting on the sidelines of Oklahoma City and celebrating the deception that they perpetrated on the city of Seattle in order to get that teams there, that reminds us…why can never root for the Oklahoma City Thunder, especially when they’re masquerading with the Supersonics’ history.”
Mahler agrees that the ‘masquerade’ is likely the most maddening part.
“When you turn on ESPN or TNT and you hear a broadcaster talking about how this is the first trip to the NBA Finals for the Thunder since 1996, well, that’s not true!” he said. “That history doesn’t belong to them, it belongs to us and we want it back!”
“Any team that’s playing Oklahoma City is my new favourite team. I’ve been a Laker fan, I’ve been a Spur fan and now I’m a Miami Heat fan, and I think the majority of people (in Seattle) feel the same way,” he added.
It’s not all agony, though. As the Thunder power through playoffs, the city of Seattle is making a big push towards getting basketball back.
Hedge-fund manager Chris Hansen has been joined by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and two members of the Nordstrom family in an effort to provide funding for a new arena and a new NBA team.
The group is essentially offering to pay for everything, and is only asking for public money in the form of bonds that would be paid back in full using revenue from the arena.
“There’s no question that people are optimistic right now that the NBA could be on its way back to Seattle…The offer on the table right now is unbelievable,” Mahler said. “The guy’s willing to put in a ton of his own money not just to build the arena but to buy the team and if that’s not good enough for us, nothing will ever be good enough.”
For the moment, Sonics fans can either watch the Thunder powerlessly, or try their hardest to look away. Whatever they choose, there is nothing that can be done about the distress they’re currently in.
Malher explained, “It stinks. It’s a helpless feeling. The fans were helpless when the team was sold, the fans were helpless when the team moved, and the fans are helpless now watching the Thunder play for the championships.”