Last Man Standing

I have had, for some time now, a rather bizarre fascination with the remnants of long-deceased franchises.

There is no rational explanation for this obsession, although I imagine it began while collecting baseball cards in the early 1980s. As much as I enjoyed discovering the nuances of Jim Essian’s 1.000 batting average or Bert Campaneris’ bizarre 1970 home run total, I was just as happy with the team names and cities which only existed as a quick blip on the back of those cards.

Sure, Toby Harrah’s last name forms a wonderful palindrome, but what the heck was the deal with the WASH at the top of his statistics? Who was the SEA on Marty Pattin’s card? And just what happened to those teams, those Roanoke Colonies of major league baseball?

As a 10-year-old, it was difficult to piece together, but fascinating nonetheless; those brief elements of history intrigued me, much the same way that the still-living actors who served as munchkins in The Wizard of Oz still command a small (pardon the pun) bit of attention from fans of that film, or why so much interest was lavished upon the last surviving members of the Titanic. In some way, they enable us to touch a piece of history.

It’s the same for the last men who played for extinct teams; their continuing existence in pro sports – whether basketball, football, or whatever – enables fans to see tangible evidence of a fable.

As you might have heard, the Sonics left Seattle nearly two years ago, with a roster full of cast-offs, rookies, and failed big men. From among that muck, though, are two young men – Jeff Green and Kevin Durant – who will undoubtedly be playing professional basketball for a very, very long time. The Pippen to Durant’s Jordan, Green may wind up outlasting his more famous teammate, but considering the age difference, the smart money is on Durant to hang on longer.

Durant is now 21 years old, having celebrated his birthday last September. By the end of this season, he will have scored – barring injury – more than 5,000 points as an NBA player. By that same age, the last two famous Seattle Sonic teenagers, Shawn Kemp and Rashard Lewis, had scored about 3,500 points.

Combined.

Obviously, we’re talking about a special player here. Having played only a single season in Seattle at the start of what should be a prosperous career, is it possible that Durant will stand alone as the longest-tenured player of a defunct team? In other words, will his career stretch out the longest after the death of his initial team?

I did a bit of research, and, surprisingly, my guess is no. Here’s the list, in ascending order, of the longest careers after a team went bust. The numbers correspond to the number of years each player was in the league after their respective team either moved or folded.

12 years
LaSalle Thompson – Kansas City Kings
Tiny Archibald – Cincinnati Royals
Calvin Murphy – San Diego Rockets
Paul Silas – St. Louis Hawks
Walt Bellamy – Chicago Zephyrs
Chet Walker – Syracuse Nationals
Elgin Baylor – Minneapolis Lakers

13 years
Adrian Dantley – Buffalo Braves
Elvin Hayes – San Diego Rockets
Don Nelson – Chicago Zephyrs

14 years
Eddie Johnson – Kansas City Kings
Tom Chambers – San Diego Clippers
Ricky Pierce – San Diego Clippers

16 years
Otis Thorpe – Kansas City Kings
Terry Cummings – San Diego Clippers

And, your champion, at 17 years
Moses Malone – Buffalo Braves

You have to admit it’s a fascinating list, featuring no fewer than six players with ties to Seattle (Baylor, EJ, Chambers, Pierce, Cummings, and Silas). Of more importance, though, is the amazing career of Moses Eugene Malone, who played two games for Buffalo in 1976-77 at the age of 21, was dealt to Houston for two first-round picks, then spent the next 17 years moving his ample posterior throughout a wide array of NBA arenas, before finally coming to rest in the Hall of Fame.

Will Durant last 18 years in the league? It’s entirely possible, of course, but consider the length of the careers of these gentlemen, who, like Durant, scored 1,200 or more points in their age 20 seasons:

Magic Johnson – 17
Adrian Dantley – 15
Chris Webber – 15
Spencer Haywood – 14
Cliff Robinson – 13
Isiah Thomas – 13
Shareef Abdur-Rahim – 12
Antoine Walker – 12
John Drew – 11
Johnny Neumann – 7

Zero for ten. To be fair, there are a number of active players who will likely reach at least 17 seasons (Shaquille O’Neal and Kevin Garnett are at the top of that list), but for every Shaq there are a whole host of Tracy McGradys.

So, while it’s hard to say if Durant will match Moses’ longevity, it’s pretty clear to me that he will be the last man standing to have worn a Sonic jersey. And maybe, 15 years from now, some kid will be looking at three-dimensional statistics on his HoloComputer and ask his dad, “Who’s this team Kevin Durant played for at the start of his career? What’s a Sonic?”

And that sound, my friends, is the sound of a hundred Seattle fans punching themselves in the leg.

NBA Champs: The First Ten Games

Vintage Sonics Halloween Fun!

Print and clip your choice of Vanilla or Lime Flavor!

As we at Supersonicsoul attempt to get our kiddies ready for Halloween ("Where'd I put that Detlef wig?"), here's a vintage Supersonicsoul cartoon from our resident artist extraordinaire Rafael Calonzo, Jr. (aka Chunkstyle) from way back in 2007.

Happy Halloween . . . and good luck with those Danny Fortson costumes!

Dale Ellis: On Tour

Perhaps the least surprising aspect of this story by Mike Griffiths of GoVols.com is the fact that, at age 49, Dale Ellis can still drain 3's.

Ellis visited his old haunts at the University of Tennessee recently, and he told Griffiths that he's interested in returning to the game, possibly as a coach. In addition, Ellis said he's headed off for a tour of Europe with, among others, Dennis Rodman and Penny Hardaway. Not exactly a dream team of coachable players when it comes to late 80s, early 90s stars, but an interesting group nonetheless.

NBA Single-Season Point Leaders, By Age

APB for stolen Shawn Kemp shoes, KFC, more

From the Post Bulletin in Austin, Minnesota:

Food was among the list of items that an Austin man says was missing after he called police to report a burglary at his apartment Thursday night.

... a resident in the 600 block of Fourth Avenue Northwest reported listed as missing from the apartment: a computer tower, a 16-inch computer monitor, Shawn Kemp basketball shoes valued at $180 and Kentucky Fried Chicken, White Castle food, pork ribs, pork chops and food stamps. Police also notified the victim that 1994 ended 15 years ago, and provided him with a complimentary 2009 Austin Police Calendar.

Sonicsgate: A Slam Dunk

There are, perhaps, as many ways to judge a work of art as there are a basketball player.

The evaluator of a player, luckily, has cold, hard numbers to help him, while a man standing before a work of art, whether Monet or Miley Cyrus, is forced to look inward and answer the question, “How does this make me feel?”

Ultimately, a great work of art stimulates thought in the mind of the viewer, creates discussion, and – if it is truly great – a wide range of opinions.

And so, while I won’t elevate it to the level of Dog Day Afternoon or Lawrence of Arabia, you have to say Sonicsgate is a worthwhile piece of art.

Okay, there are at least four or five movies in there, and, granted, two hours is waaaay too long for this story, but, that’s all immaterial, really.

What is important is that this film got made, and kudos to the three gentlemen who created it. Those who might argue that the Sonic history half of the movie should have been pared down are not grasping how important that part of the story is to Sonic fans. That is our history up there on screen, and if this film doesn’t tell our story, what will?

Sure, the film is a downer, but so is the subject matter. What did you expect, a lighthearted rom-com?

I was not eagerly anticipating the release of Sonicsgate. Obviously, I’ve digested more than my fill of this story already, and the idea of sitting through two hours of something that would leave me with a horrible mixture of anger, depression, and misery was … well it was less than appealing.

But about halfway through the movie – around the time it focused upon the botched negotiations between Steve Ballmer, the City, the State, the Sonics, and the NBA – I had an epiphany of sorts, and it really surprised me.

The NBA will come back to Seattle.

At first, it was a rush of excitement, one of those rare clear-headed moments that happen about once a year, when all the complications fall away and you’re left with a crystallized insight of the future.

It seems obvious when you think about for more than a moment, really. Assuming (I know, I know) Ballmer’s plan comes to fruition and the economy eventually reaches a point at which the $75 million required from the State becomes viable, Seattle will be left with a fantastic arena and no tenant.

And how long do you think it would take the NBA to react? Six months? Six minutes?

I understand other cities – St. Louis, Kansas City, Las Vegas, etc. – are ready to host the NBA, but none of those cities combine Seattle’s deep basketball history with the league’s guilt over abandoning it, tossed in with the fact that Seattle is a large metropolis with equally large corporations ready to spend money on luxury suites and advertising.

But almost as soon as that rush of excitement arrived, it departed, because I was left with the realization that the only way the dream of the NBA in Seattle can take shape is for us to swipe another city’s team.

And let’s face it, that is the engorged river we’ll have to cross at some point in the next few years. After all of our whining and complaining about the unfairness of Oklahoma City stealing “our team” (and, yeah, your narrator’s as guilty as anyone), we are poised to repeat that same dance on another city’s grave.

Last spring, while driving down to Portland to watch the Blazers, I had an almost identical conversation with a fellow SupersonicSoul author, and I reasoned that if we got an expansion team it would be different since it would mean we wouldn’t have the blood of relocation on our hands.

Raf’s counter-argument, as I look back upon it now, was right. Simply by building another arena and joining the NBA – whether with an expansion team or one heisted from another city – we become co-conspirators in the never-ending game of arena creep taking place across the country.

Sure, we’d be able to argue that we hadn’t stolen someone else’s team, but by creating yet another ridiculously overpriced altar to basketball, we would have given the people in Minneapolis or New Jersey or Oakland, more reason to worry that within months, they were going to hear the inevitable refrain from their team’s owner about “unbalanced revenue streams” and “lack of competitive edge.”

And I honestly don’t know how to counter that argument. As someone who likes to think of himself as a quasi-Libertarian who hates to see wasted spending, despises the way professional sports leagues play cities and fans off one another, and recoils at the thought of how many mouths could have been fed with the dollars spent on demolished stadiums, I’m torn.

There is the part of me that loves sports, and the NBA. Watching the NLCS last night, there was a moment in the 8th inning when Manny Ramirez strode to the plate with the game on the line. Ramirez v. Madson might not be Ali v. Frazier, but it was fantastically exciting to watch, and it reminded me of how it felt when the Sonics were in the championship mix for most of the 1990s.

The thrill you get as a fan in those moments is almost incomparable, and it is those moments we’re craving when we consider dipping our toe back into the NBA’s pool.

Do those moments, though, justify the expense? Will our joy in watching the Sonics compete for the ’19-’20 championship override the guilt in knowing we did to another city what we criticized Oklahoma City for doing to us, in knowing that we, as a people, spent more than a billion dollars on three stadiums – Safeco, Qwest, KeyArena – in the same time as we ran up tremendous deficits, causing all sorts of devastating cutbacks to crucial services?

It’s a tough, tough question to answer. The makers of Sonicsgate may not have intended to ask those questions, but their film certainly contributed to at least one person thinking about them.

Injuries, Pro Sports, and Patriotism

Let’s play Guess the Speaker.

“I'm very angry because once again the national teams take players and we lose out due to injuries.”

Mark Cuban? Nope.

It’s AC Milan CEO Adriano Galliani, talking to the media about his disgust with the fact one of his defenders, Oguchi Onyewu, was injured while playing for the U.S. against Costa Rica in a World Cup qualifier on Wednesday and may be out for six months.

As a result, Galliani will now be paying Onyewu to watch Milan from the sidelines– something that is understandably irksome to him.

But is anyone surprised this happened? It’s not the first time, obviously, that a professional player has been injured while competing on the world stage, but what makes this case unique from others before is that Galliani is demanding the US Soccer Federation provide compensation to AC Milan for depriving them of Onyewu’s services.

It’s an interesting demand, and, if successful, would completely destroy international competitions as we know them. Is there any country that would recruit a professional athlete if they received, along with his obvious talents, the risk of writing a multi-million dollar check if said player should tear an ACL?

Onyewu’s salary is estimated to be about $1.1 million per season (he just signed a 3-year deal with Milan this July), so his salary wouldn’t decapitate the US Soccer Federation, but imagine how devastating it would be, just as an example, if French Basketball was forced to cough up $11 million for an injury Tony Parker. I can’t imagine their budget could even begin to take on those sorts of costs, could they?


The whole idea of professional athletes performing in international competitions is tenuous at best and ridiculous at worst. While the World Cup will likely never change, simply because of the immense history and dollars involved, I would be surprised if we see NBA players and MLB players competing in international competitions for much longer; the vast amounts of money invested in these gentlemen are just too large.

If nothing else, then, Oguchi Onyewu’s injury may provide a hint that this era may finally be coming to an end.

McClendon Has Some More Wine To Sell

We all experienced Aubrey McClendon's version of Billionaire Garage Sale last spring, you'll remember, when he unloaded millions of dollars worth of wine via an auction house in New York.

It went pretty well, and combined with the dough he earned selling his collection of western art to his own company (that was a tough sell, no doubt), you'd think he wouldn't have to worry about selling off any more assets to cover the rent.

You'd be wrong.

Turns out Aubrey had so much fun parting with his wine in April, he's doing it again! In less than a month, Spectrum Wine Auctions will be offering The Aubrey McClendon Collection at the St. Monarch Regis Beach Resort in Dana Point, California.

"Fine wine buyers have a once in a lifetime opportunity to buy rare and normally unavailable vintages," Spectrum's Greg Roberts commented. Well, I suppose if your lifetime was the equivalent of a tse-tse fly's, you'd be right, Greg, but considering McClendon just got done selling $2.2 million worth of his wine less than six months ago, don't you think you ought to take it a little easy on the hyperbole?

Jack Sikma & The Trade of Eternity

Creation of a Champion

A Sonic Fan Where You'd Least Expect It

If this TNT/NBA ad is a taste of things to come, then you can bet your Tom LaGarde rookie cards I'll be watching the broadcasts this season, if only for the chance to hear a passing Paul Silas, Fred Brown, or Slick Watts reference.

(HT to Ball Don't Lie)