NBA Finals: Schadenfreude in Seattle
View media item 2051186Kevin Durant and the Oklahoma City Thunder surrendered a 3-1 lead in the Western Conference finals with a 96-88 Game 7 loss to the Golden State Warriors on Monday night. Photo: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
The Golden State Warriors’ improbable comeback from a 3-1 series deficit in the Western Conference finals Monday night gripped basketball fans everywhere. But it left three distinct groups feeling especially overjoyed.
One was the Warriors themselves, who found a way to keep their record-breaking season alive. The second was the NBA, which is all but guaranteed sky-high ratings for Golden State’s Finals rematch with the Cleveland Cavaliers.
The third was a collection of NBA fans more than 600 miles from the site of Monday night’s game, who were openly and enthusiastically rooting for the Oklahoma City Thunder to lose: the people of the scorned basketball city of Seattle.
“If they had gotten swept, sure, we would’ve liked that they lost,” said Paul Rogers, an editor and senior writer with Sonics Rising, a blog dedicated to bringing the NBA back to Seattle. “But the fact that they were up 3-1, then lost? It will sound petty, but to me, it’s almost better that way,”
For fans of the Seattle SuperSonics, who lost their franchise when it relocated to Oklahoma City in 2008, the feelings of anger and resentment haven’t dimmed much with the passing of time. For some, they may have only gotten stronger.
Rogers, who is 47 years old, didn’t try to hide his satisfaction at the Thunder’s season-ending loss. In fact, he acknowledged that he’d only really begun to pay attention to the Western Conference finals once Oklahoma City lost control of its commanding 3-1 lead in the series.
He wasn’t alone in feeling that way. On Saturday, Mariners fans at Safeco Field saved their loudest cheers of the night for when the final score from the Thunder’s Game 6 loss flashed on the jumbotron.
Monday night at Stout, a bar in Seattle’s Capitol Hill where 33-year-old salesman Miles DeCaro watched Game 7, about two-thirds of the 300 patrons were wearing Sonics or Warriors gear.
View media item 2051188Seattle SuperSonics fans lead a cheer for the return of an NBA team to Seattle during a city council hearing earlier this year. Photo: Alan Berner/Associated Press
“There might’ve been one person in the room cheering for the Thunder,” DeCaro said. “More than anything, we all just feel relieved. I’m happy the Warriors succeeded—and the Thunder did not.”
All of which underlines that many Seattle fans are far from over the franchise’s abrupt relocation to Oklahoma, which followed the sale of the team in 2006 to Oklahoma City businessman Clayton Bennett, who subsequently failed to secure the public funding necessary to build a new stadium for the Sonics.
For eight years, a rabidly passionate fan base here has been without a franchise, leaving a legion of former Sonics followers in the NBA wilderness. Rachel Engrissei, a 33-year-old recruiter for a staffing agency, said the city’s basketball fans face a dilemma: They want a team to replace the Sonics, but they don’t want it to come at the expense of another city that would have to endure a similar heartache.
“The situation came up in Sacramento a couple years ago, and we had a chance to get another team,” said Engrissei, whose father stopped watching the NBA after the Sonics vanished. “Everyone wants another team, but I didn’t want to take that away from them, because I know how that feels. They’d view us the same way we view Oklahoma City now.”
Golden State’s victory derailed what would’ve been a matchup between a pair of cities that have lived through the consequences of relocation. While Oklahoma City got the Thunder from Seattle in 2008, Cleveland lost its NFL team, the Browns, to Baltimore 20 years ago, in 1996.
Both situations were especially tough for the vacated cities because of how quickly the teams found success after moving. The Ravens won the Super Bowl five seasons after leaving Cleveland—a city that hasn’t won a major championship since 1964—while Oklahoma City has become a perennial NBA power with Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook on the roster, reaching the Finals just four seasons after relocating.
View media item 2051189Clay Bennett, right, moved Seattle’s NBA franchise to Oklahoma City after buying the team in 2006. Photo: mark d. smith/Reuters
Seattle’s feelings about Durant, who won Rookie of the Year during the Sonics’ final season in Seattle, are complicated. Fans seem to like and root for him personally, though those sentiments are generally overridden by a stronger desire to see the Thunder lose by any means necessary.
“When I see disappointment in his face, I’m not happy about it, because we like Kevin. He even came back here a few years ago to play in a charity basketball game,” said Rogers, the Sonics Rising editor. “It’s just really hard to separate him from Oklahoma City. That’s why we’d like to see him move to another team, so we can cheer for him again.”
This ambivalence isn’t reserved for Durant. Engrissei says she essentially refused to talk about the Thunder with a cousin who lived in Oklahoma because the issue remains such a sore spot for her.
DeCaro says he still won’t buy Starbucks because he resents the company’s chief executive, Howard Schultz, for selling the team to Bennett in 2006. He once turned down a free ticket to watch a playoff game in Oklahoma City in 2012 because of his feelings about the move, though he did buy a ticket to Game 2 of the Warriors-Thunder series and posed for photos wearing Sonics gear in the crowd.
The Thunder’s collapse from 3-1 up in the series meant Seattle fans were saved the pain of 2012, when they had to watch their former team reach the Finals just four years after leaving. But the fact that Seattleites continue to cringe each time Oklahoma City—or Choklahoma City, as it’s known here—makes a deep playoff run shows how much some people still care.
Spencer Hawes is a perfect example. He’s from Seattle and though he now plays in the NBA as a center for the Charlotte Hornets, he remains as anti-Oklahoma City as any other resident of his city. “It’s gonna be an open wound until we get another team,” Hawes said at a Seattle bar days before Game 7. “It hurts to see them play.”
But it didn’t hurt on Monday night. Hawes went to Game 7 in Oakland, and he was spotted after the game, outside the Warriors’ locker room, wearing a huge smile—and a Seattle SuperSonics shirt.
Chris Herring (
[email protected])
but carry on
