The Roar
The Roar

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Phoenix gets a cold, Seattle sneezes

Are the Arizona Coyotes on the move? (midwinter / Flickr)
Expert
16th June, 2015
4

The Seattle area is prone to earthquakes – I went through a couple when I lived there – but there are similar tremors every time a professional basketball or hockey team finds itself in some sort of financial strife.

Two years ago it was the Sacramento Kings who shook the earth in the Puget Sound region when it appeared that they might leave the California capital.

Billionaires Chris Hansen and Steve Ballmer (now the owner of the LA Clippers) tried to give Sacramento’s Maloof Brothers 625 million reasons to sell them the team, with the intent of moving it to Seattle.

Fans got excited and sports radio guys started taking calls on whether or not the team should be called the Sonics.

Turns out all of that was irrelevant, because the NBA voted against the move and the Kings stayed put.

Seattle was left to soldier on with the Seahawks, the Mariners and the Sounders, as well as those old standbys, microbrews and Microsoft.

Now it’s the NHL’s Phoenix-based Arizona Coyotes, a habitual franchise in trouble, struggling with a broke and back-pedalling local government. The trauma has the birds of prey in the Pacific Northwest circling yet again.

But the more things change, the more they stay the same.

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Seattle still has no suitable venue. Hansen wants to build an arena, but he won’t build it until he has a guaranteed franchise. He’s also focused on the NBA. Another big money guy, Ray Bartoszek, has proposed erecting a hockey arena south of Seattle. But for now there’s only Key Arena, where the Sonics used to play, and it holds just 11,000 for hockey.

So the Coyotes have several options – including a couple in Arizona – before they look anywhere else.

The team’s ownership group is already planning to sue the city of Glendale, which reneged on a 15-year lease deal on the arena. There’s also the possibility of a dual tenancy with the Phoenix Suns, if the NBA team decides to build a new facility of its own.

Most experts believe the Coyotes will play next season in Arizona.

After that, if nothing can be worked out locally, there are lots of possibilities, many of which are dependent on the expansion plans of Commissioner Gary Bettman. Las Vegas, which is already starting work on a new arena, is considered a lock but probably for a brand new team, which would come with a hefty expansion fee of $500 million.

Quebec City has a beautiful, brand-new, state-of-the-art arena opening in September, Kansas City already has an NHL-calibre venue, as does Portland, Seattle’s little brother to the south.

So where does that leave sports fans in Seattle? Probably in the same place they’ve been for the past few years, although psychologically speaking, it sounds as if they’re starting to accept their situation.

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While the Sonics’ departure for Oklahoma City – a place most Seattleites consider just slightly more sophisticated than the island of Sodor – still sticks in the craw like a wad of Levi Garrett chewing tobacco, several factors have helped ease the pain.

One of course is the Seahawks. Part of the reason Seattle fans went so ballistic over the Hawks is because they were exorcising years of sporting frustration. The Sonics were gone, the Mariners have never made it to a World Series and don’t look like doing so any time soon, and the once-mighty University of Washington football team remained in a rebuilding phase.

The second factor is the Sounders. The successful Major League Soccer club leads the league in attendance and has provided an alternate source of sports entertainment in much the same way Victory has in Melbourne.

And finally, it sounds as if people are starting to realise that an NBA team is not a be all and end all. Seattle, like Portland, is a quirky, funky city. The passion for the Sonics can only be held onto for so long before people start moving on to other things like sailing, mountain climbing or counting their Amazon.com shares.

Don’t get me wrong: the ground will still shake when a franchise in another city has problems. And if it’s an NBA team, the Sonics’ groundswell will be felt on the Richter scale like a Marshawn Lynch touchdown run.

But for the moment, Seattle is not about “if you build it they will come”, it’s more “if they come, we will build it”.

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