![]() ![]() More important for some teams, Seattle’s preparation for the Sonics’ return has been a bargaining chip to negotiate for new arenas. The current collective bargaining agreement ends in 2023-2024. There will also be expansion drafts that don’t create two moribund teams and negotiations with the player’s association that avoid diluting the talent pool. ![]() The existing 30 owners need to settle on a franchise expansion fee that is rumored to be in the $2.5 billion range. The last and most difficult piece for the NBA to fall into Seattle may be the NBA itself. The #StormWins, but really we all lose when people drive in the bus lane. Or better, a night mayor to help oversee the growth a real nightlife scene in the area.Īnd drivers still fail to understand what it means to be a transit lane. Adding another 40 evenings of sports each winter demands a more robust local restaurant scene. That’s left old stand-bys like Buckley’s getting really crowded, and excellent newcomers like Uptown Hophouse closing at 11pm. Lower Queen Anne has struggled finding its footing between a quiet office area and a burgeoning residential one. The neighborhood around Climate Pledge Arena is still learning how to host weeknight winter arena events. The date leads to a lot of the most recent rumors of NBA expansion announcements. The record is strong enough to host preseason NBA games between those southern teams, the Portland Trailblazers and Los Angeles Clippers on October 3. The Seattle Storm averaged over 10,000 fans a game for its first year in the arena, a third more than any other team in the league. Climate Pledge Arena is a fantastic facility for for the sport. What was built for hockey also had basketball on its mind. As we said when it opened, the new barn is awesome, and we’ll continue to say it’s awesome until Kraken left winger Brandon Tanev comes up and says anything he wants to us. Renamed as Climate Pledge Arena, the whole facility was rebuilt to modern sports standards under the historic roof. In 2018, the Oak View Group won rights to renovate what was then Key Arena. Still, the structures are now in place for Seattle to accept a new NBA franchise. When that ephemeralness was questioned, female city council members were assaulted with violent death threats. Patrons of new Sonics franchises appeared and proposed fantastic new arenas. Efforts to return the Sonics to Seattle were halfhearted and fell upon their own…swords. Unfortunately, during the 2010’s, Seattle men’s basketball did not help itself. The women of the Seattle Storm have eclipsed anything the boys tried to do. Most importantly there have been FOUR professional basketball championships. Also there have been two Seahawks Super Bowl appearances, two Sounders MLS championships, zero postings by the Mariners, and a new Kraken hockey club. Most importantly, Pickleball is a national trend that has its roots in nearby Bainbridge Island. In that NBA-less decade-and-a-half, Seattle has found other pastimes. Alas, the transit system is only now starting to catch up. In the intervening years, Seattle reinvented its urban core and recast its role in the metropolitan area. Almost a half-million new residents have moved to the region. Fully one fifth of Seattle residents did not live in the city when the Sonics last played here. Now, it has been 15 years and 150,000 people have moved into Seattle since we had an NBA team. People don’t forget that kind of rejection. It was an abdication of civic responsibility that Schultz has spent multiple self-serving memoirs justifying. Just like Starbucks drops any pretense of social responsibility once a store tries to unionize, then-Sonics-owner Howard Schultz ran screaming from community and team history once faced with a buyout offer from the lucrative corporate backwater of Oklahoma City. Men’s professional basketball abandoned Seattle in 2008. A new basketball ready arena is being built in Vegas by the Oak View Group, the folks who renovated Seattle’s arena.Įverything’s coming together. Seattle’s new Climate Pledge Arena will be hosting pre-season games on October 3 between the Trailblazers and the Clippers. The most recent alignment of planets includes television contracts and preseason games and Las Vegas construction schedules that appear to point at the Sonics emerging anew sometime in late September or early October. The NBA would like more television markets represented as it goes into a new media agreement in 2024-2025. Like gleaning divine words of prophets from on high, these orange ball prognosticators parse signs from each cloud and beer spill, hoping they portend imminent return of Supersonics basketball. Note the Space Needle, which does not exist in Oklahoma City.Īt every sideways breath of NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, Seattle fans expect news of men’s professional basketball returning to the nation’s upper left. ![]()
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