Seattle Gets Screwed

It's a sad fact of life that to own a sports team you have to be a billionaire, and to become a billionaire you have to be enormously successful in business, and to be enormously successful in business you have to be a greedy bastard.

That fact is plain to anyone that puts a little thought into it, but we still manage to be surprised when the owner of our team turns out not to give a damn about us. It's easy to pretend our owner is the good one, the charitable one who loves his city, but as Seattle Supersonics fans are finding out, they're all too willing to twist the knife.

Seattle's team, as you probably know by now, is hightailing its way out of the proverbial party--but not before stopping to shit on the coats. Owner Howard Schultz, the head of Starbucks, had the audacity to throw a celebratory press conference--complete with green and gold balloons--as he handed over the team to an Oklahoma City-based group led by Clay Bennett, who once pledged to bring a team back home with him.

The new owners said they would give Seattle every chance to keep their team, but the city has been set up to fail. They would need to finance a new arena to keep the Sonics, but the ill will created by the sale left an already-unlikely stadium proposal all but dead. Attendance will drop next season as angry fans give up on their lousy team, giving Bennett and friends the chance to announce the regrettable necessity of leaving the area. It's almost straight out of Major League. And just like that, another city loses its team.

Perhaps it should be no surprise that the head of one of the country's most obnoxious corporate entities turned out to be a heartless villain, but he's just the latest in a long line of owners backstabbing their cities. We Cleveland fans tend to forget that Art Modell was revered for a time, before he squandered his holdings, packed up his bags and took our beloved team to Maryland. In so doing he joined a legion of despised executives populated by Bob Irsay (Baltimore), Al Davis (first Oakland, then Los Angeles) and all of Major League Baseball (Montreal). Schultz and Bennett could soon enter those ranks, along with New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson (perhaps the worst of all), who wants to abandon the hurricane-ravaged city for the sunnier streets of San Antonio.

It's a sad fact that these owners, who were no doubt huge sports fans as kids, are unable to abandon their cutthroat business ethos when they buy a franchise. They enter the league, I'm sure, idealistic, excited and naive. But after losing a few million in their first season, the owners quickly jack up prices, abandon expensive players and demand new stadiums. Somehow, for all their financial acumen, these shrewd dealers miss the fact that lots of sports teams lose money on a year-to-year basis. This oversight is the only explanation for Schultz's complaints about his stadium lease (the same one that was there when he bought the team) and the costs of operating a team (Really? NBA players are paid too much?). It's possible that these owners have been made so arrogant from their success in the business world that they think they can succeed in sports where others have failed.

And yet, for all their complaints, Schultz's group made a lot of money as the owners of a sports franchise. Even if you believe their claim that they lost $60 million while owners of the Sonics (doubtful), they still made a $90 million profit in the long run. Since buying the team just five years ago, it has appreciated from $200 million to $350 million--that's $30 million per year! With that kind of investment rate, I think a team can afford to lost a little cash on Danny Fortson.

But the added value just isn't enough. When the opportunity comes to make even more money, whether via a new stadium or moving the team, most owners are all too willing to jump at the chance. The idealistic notion of public stewardship has long since passed sports by.

Whatever happens to the Sonics, the chain-reaction could hit other cities. The Blazers could jump at the chance to move to Seattle (if that market is so bad, why is Portland's team so eager to go there?), and George Shinn hasn't ruled out taking the New Orleans Hornets to Oklahoma before Bennett can--the Hornets already played there last season after Katrina left their home city unable to host a team. Whatever happens, more fans will lose the teams they love, and the owners will rake in more money.

The sad thing is that Seattle did try. They offered a pretty sweet deal to Shultz, in which he would have had to pay only $49 million towards a $198 million arena. At the rate the Sonics were appreciating in value, he could have made that money back in less than two years just by hanging on to the team. And with the new stadium revenue coupled with a more favorable lease, he would have been in the black in no time.

But accepting that deal would have meant backing down, and that's not how the NBA works. Leaving Seattle will scare other cities, who will give even sweeter stadium deals just to keep their teams from bolting. Fans in Oklahoma will pour into the arena for about a year and a half, until they realize that these are still the Sonics and they don't win any games (see: Washington Nationals). Then revenue will dry up and the process will start again, with little regard for the hometown people that are dedicated to these teams.

It happens in every sport, but the NBA's motto sums it up in a way that I'm sure Sonics fans can appreciate:

The NBA--it's fannnnnn-tastic!

(thanks to Seattlest for the picture)