The WNBA is still a fairly new league in both geologic and relative terms, and so the news that the Connecticut Sun had been sold to the folks who own the Houston Rockets and would move to Texas after this season created minimal stir, despite some ambient stink on the deal. WNBA franchises have moved before; the one that played in Houston won the league’s first four championships, fielded some of the early WNBA’s biggest stars, and was one of the sport’s most iconic organizations before it disbanded. That was in 2008, although it feels much longer ago. Today, the league’s franchises, established and expansion, are being bought up by NBA owners, and Tilman Fertitta, who owns the Rockets and is the United States’ ambassador to Italy and San Marino, evidently needs something else to do.
There was little fuss or muss, and, despite some high-powered threats, no lawsuits about the sale, and no demands for the team’s history to remain in Connecticut. The franchise belonged to the Mohegan Tribe, and they could, and did, sell to whatever party they preferred. Nobody made much of a stink about the records when the Orlando Miracle moved to Connecticut to become the Sun, either. It was just another instance of this strange business conducting business as usual.
But it’s a funny thing about sports history—for all the hard numbers underpinning it, it is generally much more contingent on negotiations and dealmaking than it is on facts. The Seattle Soon-To-Be-Super-Again-Sonics organization will rise from the crypt in the next round of NBA expansion, and will both replace and supplant the Sonics that were skirted off to Oklahoma City. The citizens of Seattle demanded the name, team colors, and records in exchange for not suing owner Clay Bennett six generations into the future back then, and Bennett didn’t care about any of that extraneous paperwork. And so the Thunder were for all intents and purposes an expansion team when they relocated to OKC, unless you knew the context. This despite having the same front office, coaches, players, and staff by whom and with which that history was made. Kevin Durant began his career with the Sonics in ’07-08 and continued it with the Thunder the next season. It wasn’t a trade that moved him from one team to the other, but it was a deal.
We’re not going to be pedants about this. Everyone agreed that the aforementioned arrangement, plus $75 million, would make Seattle less wounded and therefore less litigious, and so that’s how it reads now and forever. If it pays your DJ, all to the good. It just isn’t, you know, accurate.
The same thing happened with the Utah Mammoth, who are the old Arizona Coyotes everywhere except in the NHL’s archives, which will tell you that they sprang from nothing. The Coyotes in name and history still belong to their former owner Alex Meruelo, who bombed repeatedly trying to get a new arena built for himself in Arizona and finally agreed to accept $1 billion in exchange for transferring the actual team to new owner Ryan Smith. As part of that deal, Meruelo got to keep the Coyotes in concept and history for five years if Phoenix would consent to build him a home the town didn’t want to build for him back when they had an actual team in the city limits. Again, this was about negotiations and a hazy passel of rights and a certain saving of face, and all happened despite the fact that the actual team members, coaches, and decision makers, along with all their deeds and equipment, had definitively vanished up Interstate 15.
In other words, this kind of history isn’t a record of actual events, but a matter of what you can defend in court. This goes back to the old Cleveland Browns, who moved to Baltimore in 1996 when owner Art Modell was staring down bankruptcy; that club’s history stayed in Cleveland, waiting to be appended onto an expansion version of the Browns. Baltimore has no claim to whatever it was that the Browns were, because the people of Cleveland insisted that those memories belong to them, despite or because the current history is so poor. The fact that they would have all those memories anyway was irrelevant to the greater point, which was that the team was theirs, even though it wasn’t. It was the principle of the thing, whatever that is. It’s understandable that fans wouldn’t want to think of such a thing as being for sale at all, but it gets more complicated once it comes to what all those assets actually are, and amount to.
Connecticut fans didn’t bother fighting for that, but they also had no leverage. They’ll have a hard enough time getting interested in paying to see their team in person this coming year. But that’s a Connecticut issue, and Connecticut gets to decide what sports stuff it does and doesn’t care about beyond Geno Auriemma and Danny Hurley. I mean, they still have a bit of a thing for the Hartford Whalers, and they moved 30 years ago. Whether or not Fertitta wants to inherit the Comets’ history, which includes those first four WNBA championships, is anyone’s guess. The record book says that team died in 2008, which was a time in WNBA history when teams tended to expire rather than relocate. One supposes the old books with Sheryl Swoopes on the cover are just laying in a storage room to be picked up, dusted off, and put on new shelves, and to be claimed or disclaimed as needed.
As for Seattle NBA Team TBD, well, its new owner just has to make sure the checks clear to put the team’s faux history back into action. Unless Adam Silver’s bosses decide that the league’s planned gambit in Europe is enough growth for one decade, the New Sonics Same As The Old Although Not Really Sonics will get to pretend that they were the same franchise that started in 1968, stayed for four decades, and then took a a gap year that stretched into 18, plus future time served.
And like we said, good for everyone who wants to believe that. We’re not sure what you actually get as a prize; Bennett clearly didn’t care, and paid $75 million to get all that intangible stuff off his hands while grabbing everything he could monetize, so you won’t get the satisfaction of pissing him off the way you’d like, and the way he probably deserves. This kind of history is a weird enough concept as it is, as anyone who has ever tried to untangle the history of NBA basketball in Charlotte will tell you. In a world where every debate ends with “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it,” the Seattle SuperSonics never died, and neither, pending developments, did the Houston Comets. If only death itself was that magnanimous, or that negotiable.
Recommended
