If the NBA eventually brings the SuperSonics back, there will be plenty of time to celebrate.
But there is a question younger Seattle basketball fans understandably ask: Why did the Sonics leave in the first place?
The short answer is an arena dispute, an ownership change and a relocation fight that went very badly for Seattle.
The longer answer explains why the subject still gets people around here worked up.
The SuperSonics had played in Seattle since 1967. By the early 2000s, the team was owned by a group led by Starbucks founder Howard Schultz. Schultz’s group argued that the economics of playing in KeyArena were no longer workable and sought public help for a new or substantially improved facility.
Those efforts went nowhere.
In July 2006, Schultz’s group sold the Sonics and Seattle Storm for $350 million to an Oklahoma City-based ownership group led by Clay Bennett.
That sale changed everything.
The agreement called for Bennett’s group to make a good-faith effort to secure an arena solution in the Seattle area. Bennett eventually proposed a new arena in Renton that would have required significant public financing.
That proposal failed.
Meanwhile, Seattle voters had approved Initiative 91, placing strict financial conditions on public subsidies for professional sports facilities.
By late 2007, Bennett announced his intention to move the team to Oklahoma City as soon as the franchise could get out of its KeyArena lease.
Seattle fought back in court, attempting to enforce a lease that ran through 2010.
Then came one of the details that made the entire episode particularly bitter.
Aubrey McClendon, a member of Bennett’s ownership group, had publicly said the group did not buy the team to keep it in Seattle. Bennett said McClendon was not speaking for the ownership group, and the NBA fined McClendon.
Later-disclosed emails added further fuel to the belief among Seattle fans that relocation had been a goal much earlier than the public was initially told.
On April 18, 2008, NBA owners approved relocation by a 28-2 vote.
The Sonics and the City of Seattle ultimately reached a settlement on July 2, 2008. Bennett’s group agreed to pay Seattle $45 million immediately for breaking the KeyArena lease, with the possibility of another $30 million if Seattle did not receive a replacement NBA team within five years.
The team moved to Oklahoma City and became the Thunder.
Seattle kept something important: the SuperSonics name, colors and the possibility of reconnecting the history with a future Seattle NBA franchise.
So who was to blame?
That question can still start an argument in Seattle.
There were failures at several levels. The previous ownership group could not solve the arena problem. Political leaders and ownership never found a workable financing arrangement. Bennett’s Oklahoma City group acquired the franchise at exactly the moment Seattle was most vulnerable to relocation. The NBA ultimately approved the move.
What I don’t buy is the idea that Seattle somehow proved it wasn’t a basketball market.
The history before 2008 doesn’t support that, and everything that has happened in Seattle sports since then makes the argument even harder to defend.
The irony today is pretty remarkable.
The arena that was once at the center of the argument has been transformed into Climate Pledge Arena, a modern major-league building. The NBA has now formally begun exploring Seattle for expansion.
Eighteen years later, the league may finally have a chance to close one of the strangest unfinished chapters in NBA history.