Thunder, Sonics, and Rams Oh My Team Relocation

What do you do when your favorite team is moved away from YOUR city?

You hold a rally, and hope that team doesn’t go to the NBA Finals.

The front page of the LA Times this morning relives the events of the Seattle Sonics being relocated to Oklahoma City (linked here), and a legion of fans without a team. LA fans can empathize, but are now looking to victimize.

Kevin Durant’s first season in the league was played in a Sonics uniform in Key Arena, and along with Nick Collison they are the only current Thunder who played for their former current team in Seattle.

On Thursday there was a rally in Seattle to bring the Sonics back to Seattle (check out part of the rally here). Obviously they wouldn’t be able to bring the Thunder back as the Sonics. The Thunder are a successful franchise that is IN The NBA Finals. But as the article by Sam Farmer outlines, that’s salt in the wound for the fans in Seattle who want no part of the Thunder at all.

While OKC doesn’t have the old colors or name, the Thunder actually own the history of the Sonics. All the records and accomplishments of the Seattle franchise, including their 1979 NBA Championship, are those of the Thunder now. The only championship in Seattle’s sports history was taken away, relocated with the soon to be best player in the NBA, Kevin Durant.

The league has no interest in expansion. Thus the irony is that if Seattle wanted another team they would be the beneficiaries of another city’s misfortune, like being dumped by a girlfriend, only to go and unfairly return the favor to an other unsuspecting girl. Its someone else’s problem now.

LA has been the victim of this before. Like Seattle sans Sonics, LA is without their extricated football franchises. In successive years the Raiders and Rams left the City of Angels for the East Bay and the St. Lou—ay. Georgia Frontiere and Al Davis each dumped LA fans.

Do we really wish that on some other city in the quest to bring professional football back to LA? LA fans would be complicit and beneficiaries in passing on the loss felt by Raiders and Rams fans in ‘94 and ’95.

Seattle Sonics fans are suffering very acutely this week with their former team in the Finals. Raiders fans at least haven’t had the burden of seeing their former team succeed since “the tuck rule.”

Frankly, the emotional and social impact of relocation of another city’s franchise to LA being the main reason to not go through with such a deal is an unrealistic deterrent. That is just not practical. It’s too sentimental a reason in today’s times to not go through with a deal.

But a much better reason to not have an NFL team in LA, is we don’t need one. The market is already so saturated with teams, we have options of who to follow, and there is so much more to do and opportunities offered by our city than the need for another franchise. At their bests, The Trojans and Bruins could be enough to satiate our football appetites anyway.

As the110report’s own The LA Cowboy observed (linked here), we hold our teams to high standards to succeed. LA fans are cast as “fair weather fans,” but with competing interests our teams have to compete in their leagues to compete for our attention.

I am not sure that we need one more team to make a late hit on our LA sports fandom.

The leading candidate to come to LA is the San Diego Chargers. After the Raiders got moved north to Oakland, and then if the Chargers move north to Los Angeles, I assume the Chivas soccer team will be relocated from Mexico to San Diego by the end of the decade.

But we still don’t even have a stadium. Hold on Rams and Raiders fans, we have a long way to go.