Because of How You Care About Basketball

Koolthingzzz is not renowned for its coverage of sports. I'm pretty confident neither myself (who never posts anyway), or Jake has ever posted about sports. Anyway, I love sports. So there. Deal with it. I especially love basketball. To emphasize this: I recently watched a Pistons game with the song "basketball" by Kurtis Blow -- one of the campiest songs ever recorded -- on a loop for the entire game. This may seem excessive, but good lord, it was magical.

My point is, basketball means something to me. I can't imagine what it would be like not to grow up a Pistons fan. That's why the subject of this post pisses me off so much. Last year, the Seattle Supersonics, the city's only team with a championship, was moved to Oklahoma City -- a much, much smaller market -- as a result of a dispute over Seattle's unwillingness to build a new arena. Or, at least, that's what the official reason was. It was later revealed that the team's owners, a group of OKC businessmen led by Clay Bennett who had purchased the team two years earlier, had planned on moving the team to their hometown from the outset, and were using the lease of Key Arena to hold the city of Seattle hostage and eventually move the team. They succeeded. Sonics fans were crushed. And the worst part? David Stern, the commissioner of the NBA, just let it happen. It's like he didn't even care about the team's fans, fans like me, who had grown up with their team and devoted themselves to it. Anyway, I'm bringing this up now, because of a really interesting, free documentary that was recently released on the whole ordeal. It's really good, even if you don't like basketball (although, if you don't care for the sport, you might want to just skim through the first 30 minutes, which is basically just a history of the team), and at the very least has a bunch of interviews with Sherman Alexie, who's really awesome. Anyway, here's the link to the doc (in HD!):

http://www.sonicsgate.org/

Warning: this movie will piss you off


Anyway, so ends the first, and probably last, Koolthingzzz post about sports.