The lasting importance of David Stern’s Seattle SuperSonics heist

David Stern died on New Year’s Day at age 77, just about six years after retiring as NBA commissioner. He was largely a beloved commissioner (with notable exceptions) despite pushing numerous highly unpopular, highly questionable policies, being extremely abrasive to all comers, and being a magnet for conspiracy theory.

One of the notable exceptions where Stern is not beloved is, of course, in the city of Seattle, where he is seen as largely responsible for allowing and maybe even pushing the SuperSonics to relocate to Oklahoma City in some mixture of pique and interest in setting a new precedent.

The Sonics were stolen from Seattle and moved to OKC in 2008. The list of names who deserve blame for what happened is long. Stern shares the top spot with Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks CEO and Sonics team owner. Schultz is up there because he, a Seattleite, got frustrated with arena subsidy politics and sold the Sonics to an ownership group based in Oklahoma City, which had been angling very openly to bring a team to OKC. Schultz sold out Seattle completely and entirely because he wasn’t willing to shell out for a renovated KeyArena or a new gym, and he also wasn’t willing to do the hard work of satisfying public officials’ demands to get them on board for subsidies.

Stern is there because he could have hit the brakes at any point, he could have found another way for his friends in OKC to get a team, he could have put some controls on Schultz’s sale to ensure Seattle-based would-be buyers were given priority. Notably, the NBA has done all of this stuff since in other relocation sagas since. Stern didn’t do any of it in the lead-up to 2008. It’s a huge stain on his legacy in the NBA.

Why Stern put the knife in Seattle still isn’t clear, 12 years later. The commissioner always claimed that city and state officials wouldn’t commit to working with the NBA or the team on public arena subsidies. But KeyArena wasn’t that old, Schultz was a billionaire, the NBA didn’t seem to be spending years of effort to get something done. Look at Sacramento, for comparison’s sake. The Kings and NBA spent a decade failing to get arena subsidies before Stern bailed them out by giving them one last chance as the Kings were being sold to a Seattle-based group. Sacramento finally got a deal done at the last gasp in large part due to the enormous effort Stern and his staff put in. (Stern sent several top deputies to Sacramento for a couple years before the resolution, in part to essentially seize franchise control from the Maloofs and in part to set the groundwork for an eventual deal.)

Seattle didn’t get that kind of attention.

In New Orleans, concerned long-time village idiot and Hornets team owner George Shinn wasn’t going to meet payroll, Stern convinced the 29 other NBA team owners to collectively buy the team and appoint him, Stern, as the governor. Stern’s NBA tiger team would revive the franchise so that it could be sold to someone who would commit to keeping the team in New Orleans. The NBA team owners would share the profit.

This whole deal infamously led to the incredible Chris Paul trade veto (another stain on Stern’s legacy, in my opinion) and eventually the sale of the team to the Benson family for a modest profit with a commitment to keep the team in Louisiana. At any point in that sordid period, Stern could have sold the Hornets to an outside investor (including one in Seattle, no doubt) at a sweet profit and abandoned the New Orleans market. He didn’t. The now-Pelicans are still there, because Stern wanted them to be.

The Sonics are in fact that last NBA team to be relocated, unless you count the Brooklyn Nets, who moved 15 miles from Jersey to NYC, or the Golden State Warriors, who moved 17 miles from Oakland to San Francisco. We don’t count those as relocations. So the question becomes whether Stern’s harsh actions in Seattle taught other NBA cities that they could absolutely be left in the dust if they didn’t pony up, and they then began to pony up, or whether Stern regretted to mark that the Seattle saga left and acted differently with future situations.

His actions in Sacramento and New Orleans clearly point to the latter explanation: how the NBA was perceived for aiding and abetting (and hell, driving the moving trucks) the Seattle heist changed how the league approached other cities facing arena issues and potential relocation. To some extent, cities also now know the score — Milwaukee is a great example of that, with everyone involved moving quickly to secure public funding for Fiserv Forum with an explicit threat of relocation on the table if they failed.

The Sonics saga remains important not just because it’s a memory of a time when David Stern failed NBA fans. It’s important because it totally changed how the NBA and its cities dealt with each other, for better or worse. Seattle can’t happen again because the NBA doesn’t act like that any more and because cities know what’s coming if things go sideways. It remains a horribly sad moment for Seattle and a horribly important one for the NBA.