UPDATE: The Seattle Times is reporting a settlement has been reached.
The city of Seattle and the Oklahoma City-based owners of the Seattle Supersonics are in settlement talks this afternoon, just hours before a judge is expected to rule whether the club can buy its way out of its lease and move immediately to Oklahoma City.
This has interesting, but admittedly fringe, implications for Wichita. Downtown arena developers have touted the potential pre-season NBA link with an Oklahoma City franchise, and have even raised the possibility of landing a regular season game up here.
Regular season NBA basketball in Wichita sounds like a pipe dream to me, but any kind of partnership with a pro sports franchise can only be good news for the oft- and unjustly-criticized downtown arena.
One Comment
You just never know.
I remember reading a report about how many cities could support a pro team. They broke it down to each sport (baseball, basketball, football and hockey). They gave a percentage to likely hood they could support a pro team in each category for the top 75 cities in the USA.
The surprising thing is that Wichita actually had a 100% rating for a pro football team. I’m assuming the reason is that we don’t have a college football presence, which would kill the chances of pro football doing well in cities like OKC, Omaha and Birmingham, which has very strong college football presence.
I guess they figured the million + people in a 100 mile radius of Wichita as well. It was an interesting report.
Although I seriously doubt that the NFL would ever consider small market teams, such as Greenbay and Buffalo ever again. They are trying to expand internationally, so the chances are very dim.