OTish: Sonicsgate on CNBC on Sunday night.

[crandc]

Impoverished owners? I'll believe that one when pigs fly!

 

[Sinobas]

Imagine if the Blazers moved, then won the title a few years later......

 

[bigbailes]

i agree that there are many people culpable for the sonics leaving and it isn't all on bennett and his crew, but they put the whole thing into motion with their blantant lying. i also think the city of seattle wanted no part of keeping the sonics there, or why would they have settled an hour before the verdict? for a city of that size what does 45 million really mean? over the grand scheme of things i can't think it's that much, especially in the negative backlash those politicians got because of it.

 

[bigbailes]

here's the full version, def worth a watch if you haven't yet. for everyone on here that wants PA to sell the team, i much rather prefer the evil we know, vs the one we don't.

 

[bigbailes]

There are many many people responsible for the travesty. Bennett's group, Howard Schultz, the Mayor of Seattle, the out of touch Washington State Bureaucrats and their voters. Epic fail by all.

However, in the end, the sole responsibility lies on the NBA. This is yet another example of the National Basketball Association's blatant disregard for it's fan-base, it's customers, and the integrity of the game.

stern is evil, always has been, always will be. he's a smug little man that wields a lot of power. can't stand him and never have but until his weasel takes over for him there isn't much that can we done. it will be interesting to see what happens when silver takes over.

 

[jlprk]

Impoverished owners? I'll believe that one when pigs fly!

Income and revolving loans sometimes didn't cover expenses, requiring a "cash call." This is when the 70 or 90 (I should have memorized the number) owners had to fund the shortfall, in proportion to how many shares they owned. Many were only worth $5-10 million and that was tied up in assets of their business. It was a big strain to suddenly come up with a couple hundred thousand. This was when real estate prices had begun to fall and the artificial home prices supporting the giant Bush deficits were in a landslide. Each cash call was traumatic to the owners except the 5 or so richest, and hammered the lesson into their heads that this was a bad investment.

What is even worse than an investment which loses you money, is an investment which requires you to keep covering its losses or it will go under. On paper they were making money because the team worth was climbing. But on a cash basis they were losing their socks. The only way to collect their unrealized gain was to sell, but no big buyer appeared, the same as when Ackerley sold in 2001 to the motley ownership group Stern and Schultz had barely cobbled together.

In the last years, the only new acquisitions each year would be a couple of waiver material players picked up in the summer who were making the minimum. Do you see why I say that Blazer fans are spoiled? We have an owner who pays for his own stadium, buys picks and trades, and restocks this team annually like a pond full of fish. Things are so comfie that the bored local media makes sport of rousing up yahoo hicks to call him the worst owner in sports while he's having a cancer remission. They ought to be hanged.

 

[jlprk]

The reason the team had low operating revenue (despite its worth greatly appreciating) was the arena deal (I think with the City, if not then with some taxing jurisdiction like the County, I forgot). The City was determined not to subsidize Key Arena. Depending on who was talking, the contract was the worst in the NBA, and a model for how all cities should do it. The City (and voters and politicians representing them) felt that the taxpayers should break even in the deal, or else major cuts would be necessary to bus systems, keeping the homeless in shelters during snowy nights, etc. The NBA felt that billionaires need help with arena deal giveaways of hundreds of millions of dollars, to maintain an average payroll of $5 million per player, because lowering it to $4 million so owners can afford to pay their own way for arenas would be pitiful.

Some Sonic fans say, it's the fault of the Mayor, and the City Council, and the State Legislature, and the voters. And owner Schultz. They are wrong.

Stern could have 1) found a California owner who wanted to keep the team in Seattle, or 2) had the league own it temporarily (no one imagined he'd consider it until he did it for New Orleans) and 3) dropped the nonsense demand for a $500 million arena (the most expensive in the NBA, with zero coming from owners and all from government) located far from downtown (with its moneyed fans exiting skyscrapers at gametime) in a suburb, and have simply renegotiated the Key Arena contract when it expired in 2010 (I think it was). The new arena was a front man facade for the real economic issue, the unsubsidized arena contract. The City said they would negotiate a more subsidized deal when it expired in a couple of years, so Bennett was in a hurry to move before such offers were made. The half-billion dollar, 100% subsidized arena was to replace the 10-year-old Key Arena, which would have caused the Seahawks and Mariners to demand replacements for their own 10-year-old stadii, which politicians had approved despite voter disapproval. Politicians and voters did not want a repeat of the trauma of 3 new stadii in the 1990s.

That's all you get. I'm tired of typing on this damned tablet touchscreen one tap at a time.

 

[jlprk]

Senator John Kerry was a Yale graduate and a Vietnam veteran with 3 Purple Hearts. Audrey was the biggest contributer to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which claimed that Kerry had defrauded the military to get the medals, and which paid for these 2004 ads.



There's more political stuff, but let's shift to business fraud. Put Audrey's name into a search engine anytime you want to see the shyster's latest deals to remain a fake billionaire. Plus, there's more shenanigans from past years that I'm leaving out. On the old Sonic board, we presented so much evidence, that even the Okies agreed that he and Bennett are crooks. We actually stopped fighting over this point, and they were calling their own owners crooks.

 

[crandc]

OK but the Audrey I had in mind was Hepburn.

 

[jlprk]

New article out today.

There are a finite number of rich people in any given city, with a finite amount of money to spend on sports. When a team can make the same amount of money selling two courtside seats as they can selling an entire section of the upper bowl, they'll target their sales strategies accordingly. Getting the affluent to your games means pampering them the minute they walk through the doors. At Safeco and CenturyLink fields, the Mariners and Seahawks do just that; they're gleaming palaces of conspicuous consumption that ensure that fans paying top dollar are given a premium experience with food, drinks, and seatside service delivered efficiently and comfortably. The Sonics couldn't do that. KeyArena had some low-budget exclusive hangouts, but nothing compared to the city's other stadiums. So when Sonics execs saw the Seahawks reaping all the attention and getting fat off a stadium financed in part by public money, they didn't feel happy—they were jealous.

The timing of the Schultz announcement wasn't the only aspect of the arena push being mismanaged. It's one thing for a monarch to declare war; it's another to organize the troops to carry out the battle. The staff was not ready to advocate for the arena. Annoyed Sonics fans wondered why the team should get a new home a little more than a decade after KeyArena was remodeled on the back of $100 million worth of 20-year municipal bonds. I fielded irate calls from fans all day without a single talking point handed down from above. I could offer only platitudes about the Sonics needing a new arena to be competitive in the league. As to why KeyArena wasn't enough, or how taxpayers could be sure the Sonics wouldn't demand a new arena in another 10 years, I didn't have any good answers. Eventually our pleas for guidance traveled up the chain. What happened next only made things worse.

Alas, Walker didn't have the good sense to lie to us. He went through a litany of minor reasons why the team needed a new arena: higher capacity, bigger arena footprint, more room for high-end concessions, more places for premium seat holders, a.k.a. the super rich, the people who could afford a pair of courtside season tickets for $70,000. These were the justifications he offered us to explain why we were asking for a heaping pile of taxpayer dollars. After Walker's spiel, a member of the sales staff asked the fateful question: "Wally, what will this arena upgrade do for Joe Sixpack—the regular fan?"

Dead silence.

After an uncomfortable few seconds, Walker said, "Well, nothing." The wind went out of me. It was as if he'd punched me in the stomach. Walker tried to backtrack, but the damage had been done. The battle for hearts and minds had ended before it'd even begun. I didn't see how we'd get an arena deal led by men who couldn't conceive of it as anything but a rich man's boondoggle, perpetrated on behalf of other rich people. Average people would shoulder the costs of making sure that the Puget Sound's affluent—suits at Boeing, executives at Microsoft—could be coddled at a sporting event that average people would no longer be able to afford to attend.

http://deadspin.com/5907371/howard-...n-the-shabby-death-of-the-seattle-supersonics

 

[julius]

courtside season tickets for 70K?!

800 bucks a fucking seat!?

 

[tlongII]

The reason the team had low operating revenue (despite its worth greatly appreciating) was the arena deal (I think with the City, if not then with some taxing jurisdiction like the County, I forgot). The City was determined not to subsidize Key Arena. Depending on who was talking, the contract was the worst in the NBA, and a model for how all cities should do it. The City (and voters and politicians representing them) felt that the taxpayers should break even in the deal, or else major cuts would be necessary to bus systems, keeping the homeless in shelters during snowy nights, etc. The NBA felt that billionaires need help with arena deal giveaways of hundreds of millions of dollars, to maintain an average payroll of $5 million per player, because lowering it to $4 million so owners can afford to pay their own way for arenas would be pitiful.

Some Sonic fans say, it's the fault of the Mayor, and the City Council, and the State Legislature, and the voters. And owner Schultz. They are wrong.

Stern could have 1) found a California owner who wanted to keep the team in Seattle, or 2) had the league own it temporarily (no one imagined he'd consider it until he did it for New Orleans) and 3) dropped the nonsense demand for a $500 million arena (the most expensive in the NBA, with zero coming from owners and all from government) located far from downtown (with its moneyed fans exiting skyscrapers at gametime) in a suburb, and have simply renegotiated the Key Arena contract when it expired in 2010 (I think it was). The new arena was a front man facade for the real economic issue, the unsubsidized arena contract. The City said they would negotiate a more subsidized deal when it expired in a couple of years, so Bennett was in a hurry to move before such offers were made. The half-billion dollar, 100% subsidized arena was to replace the 10-year-old Key Arena, which would have caused the Seahawks and Mariners to demand replacements for their own 10-year-old stadii, which politicians had approved despite voter disapproval. Politicians and voters did not want a repeat of the trauma of 3 new stadii in the 1990s.

That's all you get. I'm tired of typing on this damned tablet touchscreen one tap at a time.

Bingo!

 

[jlprk]

Audrey got fired! Not from the Thunder ownership, though. I think the Swift Vets funder is going to jail.

Fired
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47247720/ns/business-oil_and_energy/t/chesapeake-mcclendon-out-chairman/

Reason: We knew he's a fraud and a little crooked, but they found that he's a major crook.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4726278...inside-chesapeake-ceo-ran-private-hedge-fund/

 

[dviss1]

The #2 owner Aubrey McClendon, the one who funded the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads which claimed that Kerry had gotten his 3 Purple Hearts through fraud, and who funded anti-gay messages, has lived a billionaire's life purely on debt for at least 3 years. He's really worth nothing. On the ESPN Sonics board before the Okies got me banned, I used to call him Audrey. Here's the latest news.

http://www.bing.com/news/search?q=a...rm=QBNT&pq=aubrey+mcclendon&sc=8-16&sp=-1&sk=

You have just helped me officially solidify my HATE for the OKC organization...

 

[jlprk]

I used to spend a lot of time digging up dirt about the Thunder. At ESPN, I had Thunder fans on the Sonics board, and Pritchard fans on the Blazers board, sneaking around trying to get me banned. Here, I just have a couple of lightweights who hate me.

How ya doing, HCP? Naah, just joking!

Dviss, whenever you don't know where to go, just use HCP as your punching bag. Just look at that beaten face. He loves it. If you need any tips, just ask the jlprk. They're all scared of me.

 

[THE HCP]

How did I get in the middle of this son?

 

[jlprk]

You are too cool, Julio!