OTish: Sonicsgate on CNBC on Sunday night.

Oh, and he was only 17 when he enlisted, and only weighed 110 pounds.

 

ANYway....

back on topic, OKC crowd is wearing T-Shirt's tonight that say "Team is Community"

 

They cut it from 120 minutes (online Director's cut) to 43 minutes (1 hour CNBC recut with long ads).

A 64% cut. I should watch the original on YouTube. What I saw last night just doesn't cut it.

One of the two principals who made it used to post with me on the ESPN Sonic board against Okies, so I'll withhold any critique till I watch the whole thing.

 

I thought of Audie and Aubrey, but didn't like either. The night before Brandon Roy won on a 3 pointer at the buzzer, so Brandon seemed a good name. Unfortunately, I feel responsible for jinxing him. Brandon the cat was a throwaway who turned out to have multiple health issues and had to be euthanized after only a month when his kidneys failed. Brandon the player is still alive but had to retire when his knees failed.

So you can blame my cat. Or me. If you believe in jinxes.
Just don't blame Audrey.

 

finally watched the entire directors cut and damn ... i never liked the sonics but how can anyone (outside of okc) root for any team run by bennett and that group?

 

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.

 

Can someone link the director's cut?

 

There is a long linkage of causation, which I posted about on this board maybe a year ago, but to cut the causal links down to barebones:

Decline of interest in Seattle<-----no wins<-----no money for FAs or trades<-----impoverished owners<-----decline in attendance<-----no creative drafts or trades<-----OWNER FIRED BOB WHITSITT

 

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

 

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

 

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.

 

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9Dp20ydm1E

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phqOuEhg9yE

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.

 

OK but the Audrey I had in mind was Hepburn.

 

New article out today.

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