Throwdown":13c4i824 said:
Wouldn't it just be totally seattle if we got screwed again though?
No. We're not a loser city. We've been a small city going through the growing pains of becoming a major market, dealt with losing sports franchises at times, and adopted a loser mentality, but we need to get over it. Look at Sacramento, a near bankrupt town who argues that the fact that no other professional sports league wants anything to do with them is a great argument for why the NBA should want to be there, that's a loser argument. Seattle is at a point where any professional sports league that spurns it does so at its own expense. It's a bad business move, because this city has money, maybe too much of it, and we love to spend it on sports. Let's get over the whole passive aggressive cautiously pessimistic BS. We're better than that. The NBA won't reject Seattle. Perhaps the NBA likes the idea of Sacramento betting the last of its assets on basketball and has no concern for the fact that a city that's near bankruptcy is looking to go all in on an arena being their savior (cause there's any evidence to support THAT kind of move). If that's the case, then the NBA will expand, but they're doing so just to keep a team in Sac. Would you expand to Sacramento if there weren't a team there? No other pro-sports league would, the A's ownership laughed at the idea of moving to Sac.
To money or not to money? That is the NBA's question.
Sacramento is a "top 20 market" only in the number of TV households. They suck where it counts: unemployment, retail spending per capita, median income, etc. And they aren't growing, they continue to lose more and more spending power. Seattle is the opposite. Will it ever be LA or NYC? Probably not, but we're moving on up. If the NBA wants to make money, they don't pass on Seattle. If they want to stay with Sac for sentimental reasons, so be it, but that decision would not be a business maneuver, because they lose money by doing so. Sacramento is a charity case for the NBA and is only in this game because they are transferring the last of their public assets to private investors (who would otherwise never consider putting money into that city).