Opinion | The joke's on Sacramento
Seattle will be better off without the NBA circus as Californian capital pays a heavy price to keep the Kings in town
It would be to easy to say the NBA deserves the fiasco surrounding the Sacramento Kings and their on-again, off-again move to Seattle. It would also be easy to revel in the irony of the presence of Oklahoma City Thunder owner Clay Bennett on the NBA's seven-man relocation committee. And it would be way too easy to say both Sacramento and Seattle deserve better than this. Yeah, it would all be too easy. But who says easy is bad?
The NBA has devolved into a sitcom, a fiefdom of noblesse oblige that would make the North Korean dictatorship blush. The things that come out of the mouths of the powers that be in the NBA are pure propaganda sound bites spewed, one would assume, in the hope of convincing the three or four people left in the world who might believe them.
This past week, the league's relocation committee voted 7-0 against the request from Kings owners Phil, George and Gavin Maloof to sell the team to a group from Seattle and accept an offer from Sacramento interests to keep it in California's capital city.
The Seattle offer was lucrative and aggressive but when a full vote was put to all the owners they not surprisingly followed orders and voted 22-8 against the move. City officials in Sacramento have said they would build a new arena with public money even though the Maloofs - who had made it clear they wanted absolutely nothing more to do with Sacramento - couldn't care less.
On Friday a deal was signed to sell a controlling 65 per cent stake in the Kings to a group led by software tycoon Vivek Ranadive. So the team are staying put, which is a considerable victory for Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, a former NBA all-star and the driving force behind keeping the team in town.
"I think that once Sacramento got engaged in doing this and being able to deliver on the promise, which didn't really exist when the original deal was made in Seattle, that the principal advantage to the incumbent was going to prevail," NBA commissioner David Stern said.
"Nobody had any doubt the same or similar thing could happen in Seattle. It was just, do you give the edge to a city that has a 28-year history of support?"