It's Official: Seattle Sonics 2.0 Group Files for Kings Relocation

According to ESPN, AP and that David Stern guy, the Chris Hansen/Steve Ballmer group (or HAN-BALL, as I like to call them) has officially filed to relocate the Sacramento Kings to Seattle.

As a Sonics fan, I should be ecstatic right now. But I can't help but remember the sickening gut punch we all received back in 2008 when the same thing happened to us. My sincere best wishes to our friends in Sacramento and here's hoping all this drama will lead to new, less crazy owners for the Kings and a shiny new expansion team for Seattle.

Gary Payton: Hall of Fame

If you are a Sonic fan (and, no, I’m not sure what that means anymore, either), you’re undoubtedly aware that Gary Payton has been nominated for – and will almost undoubtedly win election to -  the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Loyal readers might recall a couple of articles we ran that attempted to decide whether specific players (Spencer Haywood and Jack Sikma) were logical candidates for the Hall. The articles were based on Bill James’ Keltner List (Basketball-Reference should also get credit for this idea; they’ve done it with dozens if not hundreds of players).

The whole endeavor left me a little cold, if only because the Basketball Hall of Fame is not like the Baseball Hall of Fame. It’s a bizarre, illogical stew of mismatched ingredients; a few potatoes here, a couple shrimp there, and, hey, let’s throw some brussel sprouts in because, why, well not?

Put it another way: The Baseball HOF makes (some) sense, and a coherent line of questioning can lead you to an answer to the ultimate question: Is Player X a Hall of Famer? The Basketball HOF, though, is a mess, and needs a completely different line of questioning.

But enough of my rambling. On to the questions!

Is Gary Payton a Hall of Famer?

Was he ever regarded as the best player in basketball? No, although he was probably considered the second- or third-best player in the league in the mid-90s and there is no shame in being second to the best player in history.

Was he the best player on his team? Absolutely, for many years.

Did he play for the Celtics? Yes, Payton played briefly … um, what does this have to do with anything?

Did he win a Championship with the Celtics? No, and I’m not sure why this matters, can we get back to the …

Did he play for the Knicks? Did he win a championship with the Knicks? No, he never played for the Knicks.

Did he ever win a Cup? Perhaps a Spangler Cup? Or a Macedonian Elite League Cup? What? He played in the NBA Finals three times and won it once. Is that what you mean?

Is he Brazilian? Did he ever score 40 points in a meaningless exhibition game while taking more than 30 shots? No, and this whole process is really starting to bug me.

Did he dominate at the collegiate level in a small sample size and then fail to replicate that success at the professional level in a larger sample size, but we really liked rooting for him in college, and geez, wasn’t it great when the Big East really mattered? Yeah, that’s a no. He was really good at Oregon State, though.

Did he play for perhaps Fort Wayne or Tri-Cities? Are you kidding with this?

Are you sure he didn’t play with the Knicks? I think I’ve had enough.

Hey, remember when we tried to nominate Yao Ming less than a year after he retired and even he thought it was a dumb idea? Wasn’t that kind of silly? Yeah, I guess that’s one way of describing it. Wait, what does this have to do with Gary Payton?

Was he a skinflint owner whose only real contribution to the game was selling his team to somebody else 30 years later and making a huge profit? Not really, no.

Did he play for Seattle or Portland? Yes! Yes, he did. Finally, a positive sign for us! Does this help …

Actually, we’re not really interested in Seattle and Portland, unless they played in the 70s, and even then, not so much. Seriously, go screw yourself.

The Terrible, Inevitable What If Machine

With San Francisco coming oh so close to winning the Super Bowl on Sunday, 49ers fans are going through the same emotional torment that Seattle Supersonics fans suffer through on a daily basis: the dreaded What If Syndrome.

What if they avoided that costly illegal formation penalty on the first play of the game?
What if the offense had shown up in the first half?
What if the power never came back on?

As a lifelong Sonics fan, I have spent most of my life going through this sort of masochistic mental torture.

What if Nate McMillan had stayed in 2004?
What if Steve Ballmer had bought the team in 2001 instead of Howard Schultz?
What if Jim McIlvaine had never been born?

Dwelling on these dark thoughts is, of course, pointless. Time is linear. It moves on, with or without you. And yet, for many sports fans, there is a tiny room in the back of the mind that stores a terrible, horrible device that keeps track of this sort of thing: The What If Machine. Its sole purpose is to examine crucial points in time and pinpoint the exact crossroad that led to the team bus driving off the cliff.

My own personal Seattle Supersonics What If Machine recently spat out a date: June 28, 2007. The day the Portland Trailblazers drafted Greg Oden. (I'm sure many Blazers fans would like to have a replay on that day as well.)

It's hard to imagine, but back in '07, most of us in Seattle were praying that we'd somehow get Oden. At the time, he was seen as the second coming of Bill Russell. Despite the long history of number one picks tanking and the fact that Oden's bones were apparently made out of paper mache, the mystique that comes with a top draft pick is undeniable. It might have, at least momentarily, galvanized the community to fight harder to keep the Sonics in town. At the very least, Ballard would have been ecstatic about having a guy (almost) named after Thor's dad.

More importantly, He Who Must Not Be Named would still be playing in the Northwest, wiping Sam Bowie from Portland's own What If Machine, while Mr. Eggshells For Bones would be on the Permanently Too Fragile To Play List for a very mediocre midwest team that no one cared about.

But, like the Mirror of Erised, spending too much time with the What If Machine will lead to madness. Dwelling in the past is the ultimate act of futility.

Kind of like cheering for a professional sports team.