I will be done with the NBA if the Kings move! Being that Baseball and the NFL season are on nearly complete opposite schedules the EPL would have filled in for me. I love the Kings, but if after doing everything the city did to retain this team I could not support their product anymore if they felt this town was not deserving.
Make no mistake about this though. There are Seattle fans en mass that feel they were wronged in this process which is further from the truth! There are people in San Francisco posting bad crap about Seattle's May Day Parade. People in Seattle posting crap about Sacramento's small business climate. This has turned into Seattle vs Sacramento and it's wrong. This has for me ALWAYS been about the city of Sacramento doing what it has needed to do.
I was listening to Victory and this line by P. Diddy "you ain't gotta like me. You're just mad cause I tell it how it is and you tell it how it might be" is my new mantra on these boards. We never had to prove our offer was better than Seattle. We never had to prove we had a better ownership than Seattle. We just needed to prove who we are because the Maloofs tried to put our city in a bad light. We did that...hands down! The world want to hear what it might be like in Seattle, but the NBA already knows it's good in Sacramento. ESPN 710 had a good article up:
http://mynorthwest.com/422/2264433/King ... tay?page=3Danny O'Neil wrote:Seattle doesn't deserve another city's franchise just because of the way its former franchise was wrangled into Oklahoma, and Seattle doesn't deserve another city's franchise because its prospective ownership group has more money or because of the size of its TV market.
It's not about you, Seattle.
The league's relocation committee didn't screw Seattle by recommending against the move; it declined to screw Sacramento, and there is an important difference.
Seattle and its fans have every right to feel used in this process. They were the leverage used to spur Sacramento's urgency to put a deal together. It's OK for Seattle to be resentful, even, that commissioner David Stern was an advocate for Sacramento in a way that he never was for Seattle after Clay Bennett purchased the team from Howard Schultz.
But Seattle was not wronged in this situation. It wasn't victimized, and as admirable and steadfast as Chris Hansen has been in navigating both the political and economic obstacles – first in developing an arena plan and then negotiating a deal to buy the Kings from the Maloofs – it will be very interesting to see what he does next.