Time apparently doesn’t heal all wounds.
The Thunder won the franchise’s first NBA championship since moving from Seattle to Oklahoma City Sunday night with a Game 7 win over the Indiana Pacers.
For one Seattle sports broadcast, this was not news worth celebrating — or even news at all.
Fox 13 sports director Aaron Levine concluded a 30-minute sports show Sunday night with a note about the result of Game 7.
“Finally tonight, unfortunately, the Indiana Pacers lose Game 7 of the NBA Finals,” Levine said as the show signed off. “Big game for the Sounders tomorrow! We will see you out at Lumen Field.”
That was it. There were no highlights, no mention of the score or a championship and no utterance of the words “Oklahoma City Thunder.”
Just to hammer home that the absence of coverage was not merely an oversight, Levine tweeted out video of his sign-off with a caption:
“How this #Seattle news station covered Game 7 of the #NBAFinals at the end of our half-hour sports show. The way it should be. @Fox13Seattle #BringEmBack #StillBitter”
Stay bitter, Seattle.
(Steph Chambers via Getty Images)
Why so bitter?
In 2008, Seattle — and basketball culture as a whole, to be honest — was robbed of the SuperSonics, one of the coolest franchises in the NBA. Seattle loved its Sonics, a franchise that had resided in the city for 41 years, produced an NBA championship in 1979 and one of the iconic teams of the ’90s featuring Shawn Kemp and Gary Payton.
In 2006, Oklahoma City native Clay Bennett led an ownership group to buy the Sonics from Starbucks business titan Howard Schultz. Bennett vowed at the time of the purchase to make a good-faith effort to keep the Sonics in Seattle amid negotiations for a new arena.
Comments from Bennett’s ownership partner and OKC energy tycoon Aubrey McClendon in 2007 to an Oklahoma paper stated otherwise.
“But we didn’t buy the team to keep it in Seattle; we hoped to come here,” McClendon told the Journal-Record.
Then-NBA commissioner David Stern fined McClendon $250,000 for those comments. Months later, Stern and 27 of Bennett’s 29 fellow NBA team owners joined Bennett in clearing the way for the Sonics to move to Bennett’s home town.
They’ve been the Oklahoma City Thunder ever since. And now, they’re NBA champions. And Seattle remains without an NBA franchise.
Schultz, meanwhile, calls selling the Sonics to Bennett’s group “one of the biggest regrets of my professional life.”
So forgive the locals in Seattle if they’re not joining in on the Thunder celebration — or acknowledging it at all.
