Bucks fans will spend the next 2-3 years looking over their shoulders at Seattle, and that’s because they’re in jeopardy of losing their basketball team should owner Herb Kohl fail at securing a new NBA-approved arena.
It’s not every day that an NBA basketball game becomes the site of Guinness World Record testing, and as you might have heard Sacramento Kings fans are wasting no time putting their grassroots organizations to work by attempting to break the indoor sound record of 106.6 dBA previously set by the fans of the Bucks (plus a few Clippers fans) at the Bradley Center in 2008.
It sounds strange to anybody that followed the Kings and Lakers rivalry over the last decade, but the “Shaqramento” era took off on Tuesday in Sacramento, where minority owner and team consultant Shaquille O’Neal introduced himself to the media.
It has been said throughout the Sacramento Kings saga that the presence of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in Seattle’s ownership team has been a big plus as they seek to buy and relocate the team.
While Sacramento’s fight to keep their Kings could extend all the way to the NBA’s Board of Governors meeting on April 18-19, this week will prove pivotal as both Sacramento and Seattle are set to give their best pitch to the BOG’s joint committees tasked with reviewing the matter today in New York.
We’ve discussed the issues that will determine whether or not the Sacramento Kings stay in California’s capitol or go to Seattle, including the impact of public subsidy support in both cities, the race between the two cities for an arena deal, and what lawsuits pending in Seattle mean to the process.
As Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson has been advertising for the past month, we did indeed get confirmation of the identity of his ‘whales’ at his State of the City address on Thursday.
The question of which city, Sacramento or Seattle, is ahead in the race to bring the NBA a brand new arena attached to a shiny new public subsidy is unclear at this time, but sources with intimate knowledge of the situation tell PBT that so long as Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson delivers on his promises that Sacramento will be ahead in that process.
CORRECTION: February 8, 2013 An earlier version of this post incorrectly referred to a May 2003 document as an addendum to the Kings’ 1992 ownership agreement.
There aren’t a lot of people willing to give Sacramento much of a fighting chance to hold on to the Kings, but they’re not going down without a big money fight.
While Sacramento will get a final shot to convince NBA owners that this is not something they want to approve, sources have told ProBasketballTalk that Seattle’s Chris Hansen is ready to announce a tentative agreement to purchase the Sacramento Kings in the coming days.
With reports swirling that the Kings’ move to Seattle is a mere formality at this point, the story on the ground in Sacramento is much, much different.
Remember hearing the stories about Kings fans and concerned Sacramento citizens trying to raise money for an arena when the Maloofs first announced their intention to move to Anaheim?