[JohnnyLingo]

Originally Posted by surfah33

You're an idiot. There are businesses all over the country who set up shop where they did because cities enticed them to with all kinds of benefits including subsidies from taxpayers or other tax breaks.

I'm still hesitant to equate schools and hospitals with Barnes and Noble. Call me an idiot if you want, but I believe schools and hospitals serve an important function in society and are very different from your average business.

Has anyone read this? A collection of e-mails from Seattle residents who are pissed about the whole situation. Some of the more interesting points:

While the city of Seattle is not blameless in this situation, Bennett, McClendon and their cronies are a pack of lying thieves who never, ever intended to honor their contract to make an effort to stay in the Seattle area. Funny how they demand a $500 million arena from Seattle but not from OKC, where a $92 million Ford Center is somehow a better option than a $100 million, 13-year-old KeyArena with a $200 million remodel.

Clay Bennett's proposed arena was $500 million. Put into perspective, Seattle has built both a baseball stadium with a retractable roof and an football stadium engineered for incredible acoustical advantages for MUCH cheaper. Football and baseball have a larger field of play and seat more than twice as many fans as basketball does (assuming it was Clay's intention to field a team good enough to fill an arena). Why so much more expensive? Obviously it was his intention to create an unfeasible goal (this isn't even getting into the proposed location 15 miles south of the city and the nearly non-existent time frame). Being wildly unreasonable allowed Bennett to get the "no" he wanted from the city.

For some reason there are people out there who think that the people of Seattle aren't doing enough for their team. Can you please tell everyone that if we have to put up a new arena, then that means we have set a precedent that an NBA team needs a new arena every 13 years? This makes no sense. Why doesn't David Stern or the general public realize this?

Just over a year ago, I went to visit Seattle with my sister, who was looking at the University of Washington. The hotel we stayed at was a block from the KeyArena, and the first night we were there just happened to be Iverson's second game as a Nugget, and I talked my sister into going to the game last minute, because (a) I had never seen Iverson play in person, and (b) I wanted to see if basketball was truly dead in Seattle.


When we went over to the Arena, there was a line so long it stretched halfway to the Space Needle. This was basically at game time and we soon found out the game sold out. Lucky for us, we were able to find tickets anyway for a soldout game. Even if it was Iverson, turning away hundreds and maybe thousands of potential ticket buyers is like nothing I've ever seen attending Bucks games in Milwaukee. We went to our seats, which happened to be in the last row, and it didn't even seem like we had bad seats. And even though the Sonics sucked last season, the fans were completely behind their team the whole game. It was a great time. And it didn't stop there. Normally, my sister could care less about the NBA. After spending a week in Seattle, she was a Sonics fan. Hell, I almost was. I hate the NBA for this. The Sonics need to stay in Seattle. Period.

Obviously these e-mails only portray one side of the issue, but it sure sounds to me like they're getting screwed.