Sonicsgate

Defending NBA champions, the Los Angeles Lakers held on for a gritty 87-79 victory over the Oklahoma City Thunder Sunday... There are some bitter ex-Sonics fans in Seattle who cheered OKC's loss.

A review by Bill Littlefield of NPR's Only A Game.

Sonicsgate is driven in part by the filmmakers’ conviction that they’ve got an important story to tell.

That conviction has driven director Jason Reid and the producers who worked with him to include enough material to push their film to almost two hours, which may feel long to some viewers.

But anybody patient enough to stay with Sonicsgate will be rewarded with the careful documentation of a series of sleazy, shameful assertions, misrepresentations, and lies by a slew of people involved in owning or trying to own the Seattle Super Sonics before the team was eventually moved to Oklahoma City. Beyond the obvious villains, eventual team owner Clay Bennett paramount among them, there are plenty of lesser miscreants: NBA Commissioner David Stern, for example, and politicians, team officials, and others anxious to cover their backsides as the team slides out of town.

I don’t know to what extent what happened in Seattle before the Sonics left is representative of what has happened in other cities that have lost teams. Certainly there would seem to be at least a few factors common to most relocations: greed, feeling of entitlement on the part of ownership regarding public financing of a new building, threats from the owners and Commissioner Stern, and the presence of a potential new home city full of enthusiastic and naïve fans. Whether the film is the story of all teams that relocate or only one, Sonicsgate certainly demonstrates that in this instance, anybody who thought of the basketball team as anything other than a moveable commodity was a sucker doomed to be disappointed.

Audio: WBUR & NPR's Only A Game 4/17/10, Host: Bill Littlefield.

Producers of Sonicsgate have placed the full movie online at YouTube.

I lived in Seattle between 1990 & 1994. It was the era in which plans to modernize the Seattle Coliseum into what became Key Arena were approved. Then Sonics owner Barry Ackerly was pushing for improvements at the building that began as a pavilion at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair. But the mood of the public was against picking up the whole tab.

As the sole major league sports tenant, he had considerable weight in the plans, and pushed for a design which made it impossible to construct an NHL regulation size rink in the building... Edging out the Western Hockey League's Seattle Thunderbirds as a co-tenant and ensuring that no NHL team would ever come to the city.

The Sonics had recently become competitive by drafting power forward Shawn Kemp (1989), point guard Gary Peyton (1990), hiring coach George Karl (1992) with strong regular season showings in 1992-1993, and so it looked as if Ackerly, whose broadcast holdings were headquartered in Seattle, was committed to the city and team. His approximately $21 million share of construction cost, looked good to locals, but sealed the team's fate two owners later.

Ironically, trying to cut corners on the expense of repairs to the Kingdome's roof was what caused a portion of it to collapse in July 1994, with both the Mariners and Sea Hawks displaced and threatening to leave, before publicly funded plans for Safeco Field (baseball) and Qwest Field (football) were finally approved.