This tweet has my conflustered. It shows a couple pictures of Xavier McDaniel playing a game in the MC...wearing Sonics home uniforms and playing G-state. is it some kind of summer league game or something? I know it's from 1986, but i don't think there is any box score that shows the Sonics playing Golden State in Portland.
Tweet this to Rich Patterson with the Blazers. Dude is a walking encyclopedia of Blazers history. I bet he was even there.
What is now called the preseason used to be called the exhibition season. To attract fans to empty courts, there were doubleheaders and cheap ticket prices. I went to a couple in Seattle in the 70s. The home team always played in the second, not first, game. If this game was Seattle vs. Golden State in Portland, there is no mystery why it was in Portland. The tweets say that that the players in yellow uniforms couldn't have been the Blazers. If it was a doubleheader, they might have been the team waiting for the next game to start. Because of few fans, they could sit up front. Also not mentioned in the Twitter thread is that the Sonics played an entire season in Tacoma while Key Arena was built. I saw X-Man and the Sonics play here in Bellingham at the college stadium. Any arena which paid the team $12,000 got an exhibition game. Before X-Man, the Sonics played many games in the giant basketball-unfriendly Kingdome. So in one championship series, they gave away the homecourt advantage and the NBA title to the Bullets. The owner made a few extra bucks though, and escaped media criticism, which he deserved. I won't name Sam Schulman, though I should. One tweet suggests the Summer League, but there was none then.
Key Arena wasn't being rebuilt/etc, and the Sonics weren't playing in Tacoma in 86. Nor was this picture taken in the 70's
Looks like it was a double header played in the 1986 Northwest Summer League in Portland. Looks like the date of game was 7/18/1986.
It could be any number of arenas with red seats. It could be Joe Louis Arena, or Thomas Mack. I don't think it's the MC.
