Where the Thunder Comes Dribbling Down the Plain

Matthias Clamer for The New York Times Hoop dreams, realized: Oklahoma City goes major-league.

By BRUCE SCHOENFELD

On the far northern edge of Oklahoma City, in a converted fitness center off a desolate road past a lumberyard, the National Basketball Association’s newest team has been holding its practices. One morning earlier this month, Clay Bennett, the Oklahoma City Thunder’s controlling owner, was standing beside a stack of free weights, his elbow resting on a chest-high dividing wall, watching a preseason workout. Despite his size — 6-foot-5, close to 300 pounds — he seemed to cast almost no presence. Later that day, the Thunder would fly to Billings, Mont., for its first exhibition game and make history, after a fashion: no sports franchise permanently based in Oklahoma had ever competed in one of North America’s four major leagues. Bennett stayed quiet as he pondered these high-priced athletes in their cornflower blue jerseys who were now representing his state and his city. “There’s a word for this, and it’s an overused word and not quite the right word,” he told me, “but the word is ‘surreal.’ ”

I’d been thinking exactly the same thing. For more than 40 seasons, the Thunder played in Seattle as the SuperSonics. The team captured an N.B.A. title in 1979, reached the finals on two other occasions and, at one point in the 1990s, sold out every home game for more than three consecutive seasons. With Seattle on a roll — it’s home to Microsoft, Amazon.com, Starbucks, Costco, Nordstrom — it is difficult to fathom why any team (or business, for that matter) would leave the city and its famous quality of life for a metropolitan area one-third its size. And why Oklahoma City? Even in its own state, Tulsa would seem to have greater national prospects, with its rolling hills, mansion-filled neighborhoods and cultural accouterments of a serious place, as opposed to flat, brown, insular Oklahoma City, where unseemly oil wells blight even the Capitol grounds. Farther afield, metropolitan areas without N.B.A. teams include San Diego, St. Louis, Kansas City, Nashville, Tampa and Anaheim, big-league markets all. So it’s not surprising that Oklahoma City wasn’t even on the N.B.A.’s list of potential candidates for expansion or relocation three years ago. It is, as Bennett admits, almost the archetype of the minor-league place: “When they first started looking at this, and the idea of the team moving from Seattle, a lot of the other owners said to me: ‘I like you, Clay. But when I hear Oklahoma City, I think Des Moines and Omaha.’ ”

Perhaps nobody finds the metamorphosis of the SuperSonics into the Thunder harder to accept than many of the citizens of Seattle. Every relocation of a big-league franchise begets a certain amount of hand-wringing and recrimination, but this one unfolded with remarkable acrimony. It ended in July, at least officially, when a suit brought by the city of Seattle seeking to keep the Sonics in town until 2010 was settled for $75 million. (The payment will be substantially reduced if Seattle gets a replacement team within five years.) But the emotions invested in keeping the Sonics appeared to be less about a consuming interest in professional basketball than the humiliation of a smart, sophisticated city losing a franchise to a perceived cow town. “There wasn’t much excitement about the Sonics, to be honest,” Nick Collison, who is beginning his fifth season as one of the team’s players, told me. But the idea of the Sonics moving to Oklahoma City, he adds, “said something about Seattle that people there didn’t want to believe.”

The same attitude manifested itself in antipathy toward Bennett, one of four principal partners and several minor investors who together paid $350 million to buy the team from Howard Schultz, the Starbucks chief executive, and his partners in July 2006 and then tried in vain to get public financing for a new arena. With his brush cut and beefy build, his lifelong Republicanism and partners made rich by fossil fuels, Bennett pushed all the wrong buttons in liberal, urbane, health-conscious, ecologically sensitive Seattle. In fact Bennett is substantially more nuanced than his image suggests. He is polite almost to the point of courtliness. He and his wife, Louise, own a literary bookstore outside Aspen, Colo. His office is decorated with glossy books featuring the work of the Colombian artist Fernando Botero. Far from being a stereotypical cowboy from the plains — “I don’t even own a pair of cowboy boots,” he says — he was raised by a Jewish mother and celebrated a bar mitzvah, though he now attends his wife’s Presbyterian church. But Bennett didn’t show any of that worldliness, and Seattle wasn’t looking to see it. “Everybody there but me knew I was heading down the wrong path,” he says. “Hindsight suggests I was not going to be successful.”
Yet given the way professional basketball has evolved, the Sonics’ move may have been inevitable. As I spent time in both Seattle and Oklahoma City, it became evident that the intense passions on both sides — Oklahoma City has been as feverish about the team’s arrival as Seattle was about its departure — were obscuring a larger issue facing the N.B.A. It may be that a midsize market like Seattle, with its big-league baseball and football teams and a wealth of recreational and entertainment options, has outgrown professional basketball, or at least the desire to fight terribly hard to keep it. A more appropriate home for a franchise these days seems to be a smaller city on the rise, with maybe a million to a million and a half people, plenty of money, local and regional art museums and a few ambitious restaurants but not too much else for its population to do, and an excess of civic pride ready to be harnessed. A place, in other words, exactly like Oklahoma City.

For delivering the Thunder, Bennett has gained the status of a civic benefactor. To older residents, he lives in the shadow of his father-in-law, Edward L. Gaylord, who before his death in 2003 amassed an empire that included newspapers, luxury hotels, a television network and Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. Bennett’s own, under-the-radar business success — he runs Dorchester Capital, a private investment company whose size he refuses to disclose — has been modest in comparison. His identity is now that of N.B.A. owner. He was inducted into Oklahoma’s Hall of Fame last year at the age of 47. That the N.B.A.’s commissioner, David Stern, flew in to make Bennett’s introduction shows how much that honor derives from his bringing big-league sports to the state.

Economically speaking, the Thunder will cause barely a ripple in Oklahoma City, where two energy companies with combined annual revenues approaching $20 billion, Devon and Chesapeake, are headquartered. The average N.B.A. team generates $120 million or so in revenue. The psychological impact, however, will be much greater. Never mind that the N.B.A.’s television ratings are slipping or that it doesn’t generate nearly the buzz that it did when Michael Jordan was taking the sport worldwide. When the Thunder begins its regular season against Milwaukee this Wednesday, Oklahoma City will find itself listed in the league standings among Dallas and New York and Los Angeles. “It will enhance public perception of the entire state,” gushed Brad Henry, Oklahoma’s governor, when we spoke. “We’ll be on SportsCenter every night.”

Almost unanimously, it seems, Oklahoma City’s establishment — businessmen and columnists, Democrats and Republicans — believes that the N.B.A.’s presence will validate a community that seemed hopelessly downtrodden only a short time ago. In April 1995, a bomb ripped through the Murrah Federal Building, killed 168 people and added a horrific climax to both an economic slide that started with the decline of oil prices in the late 1980s and a self-esteem problem dating to the Great Depression.

But even during its boom times, when oil barons were spending freely, Oklahoma City had no reason to believe that it would ever be major-league. For Bennett, as for most Oklahomans, the home team was the National Football League’s Dallas Cowboys, who play three hours down the highway. As an adolescent, he once dreamed of owning the Cowboys; though he’s built like a former defensive lineman, with a belly spilling over his belt, his main interest in sports has always been administrative. He still follows the Cowboys, and University of Oklahoma football, but he’s not one to quote statistics or know much about the subtleties of various players, even his own, and it’s impossible to imagine him pulling on a team sweatshirt and heading off to a sports bar. At one point, he considered moving to New York to pursue a business career in sports. But he’d already fallen in love with Louise Gaylord, whom he started dating in high school, and Edward Gaylord’s daughter wasn’t going anywhere.

After attending O.U. for two years and Binghamton University for one, he began work at his own family’s business, which manufactured windows and doors for residential construction. The company was successful, but it couldn’t contain Bennett’s ambition to somehow act on a larger scale. Based on contacts he’d made in the local business community, and boosted by his Gaylord connection, he landed the job of running the U.S. Olympic Festival, which had been awarded to Oklahoma City for 1989. A multisport event for U.S. athletes that at the time was held in non-Olympic years, the occasion ended up being the first great thing to happen in the city since the bottom fell out of oil in the mid-1980s. “Writers from papers around the country were saying, ‘Oklahoma City did a great job,’ ” Bennett says. “For Oklahoma, that was significant.” The event put Bennett on the city’s radar as more than the mere suitor who landed Gaylord’s daughter. It also rekindled his enthusiasm for sports. Seeing precious little on the local landscape beyond minor-league franchises in baseball and hockey, he decided to make Oklahoma City the amateur-sports capital of America.

In 1992, the city passed a referendum calling for a new minor-league baseball stadium, a new arena (the Ford Center, where the Thunder now play), gentrification of the downtown warehouse district and other revitalization projects. One of these was a rowing facility that Bennett intended to be the first step toward attracting the national governing bodies of various sports. But by 1995, civic support had waned. Then the Murrah Building was bombed by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. “The bombings galvanized the average person to realize that the city needed to make a statement,” Frank Keating, then the state’s governor, told me. “There was a sense of pride and optimism and faith that bordered on the spiritual. It was quite remarkable.” Nearly 200,000 residents went to at least one funeral; 75 percent of the population volunteered or gave money. “It brought us all to our knees,” Bennett says. “We all became connected.”

Caught up in the spirit of goodwill, business and City Hall agreed to supplement the original revitalization effort, called MAPS, with further initiatives. Oil and gas recovered. Transforming the city into a hub for national amateur sports bodies wasn’t working — Indianapolis grabbed that distinction — but Bennett, working on Gaylord’s behalf, helped keep the Class AAA baseball team, the 89ers, in town by buying it. (The team is now called the RedHawks and owned by someone else.) When Gaylord became a major investor in the N.B.A.’s San Antonio Spurs, Bennett participated in the ownership group, at one point serving as its representative to the league’s board of governors. Gaylord sold his interest in 1996, and Bennett came away with a keen awareness of what the N.B.A. had done for a minor market. “For the first time, I recognized the role a team could play in the visibility and marketability of a community,” he says. “I became aware of just how important to a place a big-league team could be.”

FOLLOWING THE DEPRESSION, about the only display of excellence the state of Oklahoma had to offer was O.U. football. When George L. Cross, the institution’s president from 1943 to 1968, told the state’s Legislature that he wanted to build a university that the football team could be proud of, that wasn’t misplaced priorities on display but an acknowledgment of the standard that football, and only football, had set. “It was the dominant program in the country,” Joe Castiglione, O.U.’s current athletic director, says. “It gave Oklahoma an identity it didn’t otherwise have.”

Growing up in Oklahoma, Mick Cornett appreciated the renown the Sooners brought to the state. He spent 17 years as a sportscaster before turning to politics, and then he was elected mayor in 2004 on a pro-business platform. In office, he had a keen awareness of how outsiders perceived his city. “We had a branding problem,” he says now. “We have allowed ourselves to be branded by our tragedies. If you said ‘Oklahoma City,’ chances are the next word out of your mouth was ‘bombing.’ ” Determined to use sports to change the city’s image, he turned to Bennett, whose investment business was beginning to provide him with, as he puts it, “significant money.” Armed with Bennett’s interest in leading an ownership group, Cornett started pitching the people who could get him a team. Oklahoma City had failed before in a bid to land a National Hockey League expansion franchise, but Cornett visited Gary Bettman, the league’s commissioner, anyway. And he lobbied Stern; the N.B.A. commissioner was sympathetic but hardly optimistic. The N.B.A. had no plans to expand, he told Cornett, and no teams looking to relocate. “After a while, he started calling me ‘the Mayor Who Won’t Go Away,’ ” Cornett says. He remembers standing on a sidewalk in New York after a meeting in Stern’s office in 2005, painfully aware that he had no logical reason to return again.

That August, Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. Within hours, Cornett called Stern to propose that the N.B.A.’s suddenly homeless New Orleans Hornets play at the Ford Center. Stern dimly recalled that he knew a wealthy investor in Oklahoma who once represented the Spurs. He couldn’t remember Bennett’s name, according to Cornett, which shows what shallow footprints Bennett must have left his first time around the league, but he had positive recollections. That Saturday, Stern tracked down Bennett in a luxury suite at an O.U. football game. Bennett took a phone into a janitor’s closet and, amid the mops and pails, agreed to guarantee $40 million in sponsorships and ticket sales, hire a local staff, make temporary arena enhancements and do whatever else was necessary to attract the Hornets for a year and perhaps longer, depending on the extent of the storm’s damage.

George Shinn, the Hornets’ owner, didn’t have Oklahoma City on his radar screen. “I was getting calls from around the country, Vegas and on and on, and David threw out Oklahoma City,” Shinn says. “And I said: ‘David, I don’t think I want to go there. I’ve never even been there, and it doesn’t sound like — do they even have an arena?’ But David’s got a way of recommending that sort of pushes you.” Stern had a hunch that it was the right place for the Hornets to go. “Clay Bennett, Mick Cornett, the attempt to get an N.H.L. team, the arena — it seemed like it could work,” Stern says. More important, perhaps, he had the right man. “Clay was the leader,” says Larry Nichols, who runs Devon Energy, one of America’s largest producers of natural gas. “He knew how to do it. He called a few friends and said: ‘O.K., here’s what we need.’ We all signed up.” Within hours, Bennett had his $40 million.

The Hornets’ relocation was supposed to be temporary. Seats were expensive, and the team was terrible. Bennett pushed the city’s executives not merely to buy advertising and sponsorship deals but also to spend freely at the box office, which he knew the N.B.A. would notice first. “He knows exactly how much he — ‘window-dressed’ is the term I heard — the market,” says Ian Edmundson, a sports consultant who has worked with the Hornets. In New Orleans the previous season, the Hornets drew 11,299 fans per game. But in Oklahoma City, with ticket prices $13 higher on average, they managed 16,330 and brought a carnival atmosphere to downtown. “It was an almost euphoric response,” Castiglione says. “A unique set of dynamics that made for an incredible run.”

Convinced that the city was ready to go national, Bennett tried to buy the Hornets and keep them in Oklahoma. According to a letter Shinn subsequently wrote to Stern, Stern recommended that he sell. “You pressed me to sell the team,” Shinn wrote. “You even told me that owners were asking you, ‘What’s wrong with George — why doesn’t he sell his team[?]’ ” Shinn’s response made it clear that he, too, coveted the new territory. “We need to immediately begin laying the foundation for what I believe will be great relationships in Oklahoma City,” he wrote. “I believe there are several options that we have, none of which involve returning to New Orleans.” And just as Shinn had designs on Oklahoma City, Oklahoma City had designs on the team. “The Hornets are ours,” the sports columnist Berry Tramel proclaimed in the Gaylord-owned Oklahoman.
But sports in New Orleans was about to take on metaphoric significance. Swaggering and self-confident before Katrina, the city now looked to its teams to bear out its recovery, in the same way that Oklahoma City was seeking a franchise to trumpet its own transformation. “We look at sports teams as businesses, and they are,” says Hugh Weber, Shinn’s brother-in-law and the Hornets’ president. “But they’re also community treasures. They can rally people around ideas.” The N.F.L.’s Saints returned to the Superdome in September 2006, shortly before the Hornets began their second season in exile, and amazingly, illogically, began to win as never before. With each victory, it felt as if another ward of the city had been restored. After that, the Hornets could hardly sneak away. Shinn returned the Hornets to New Orleans, which had never much cared for them. He negotiated a new lease (with an attendance-based escape clause to keep his options open), then watched the team catch fire, both on the court and at the ticket window.

Rebuffed by Shinn, Bennett found another option. The SuperSonics had been trying to replace outdated Key Arena for almost a decade, spanning two ownership groups. I attended one of the last games the Sonics would play there last April and felt as if I were visiting my old elementary school as an adult. Hallways were cramped and narrow, and the arena lacked the amenities — upscale restaurants, retail areas, meeting spaces — that serve as profit centers for today’s pro franchises. What’s more, it was widely acknowledged that the Sonics’ lease was the N.B.A.’s worst. It gave the city a large percentage of revenues from luxury suites, club seats and concessions, income that teams leaguewide routinely keep for themselves.

For four years, Howard Schultz (who declined to be interviewed for this article) had been trying to persuade government officials to build him a new facility. A Seattle celebrity, the man who made the city’s coffee famous, he pulled every string at his disposal, without success. Largely against their will, taxpayers had recently financed two expensive stadiums, one for Major League Baseball’s Mariners and one for the N.F.L.’s Seahawks. They were in no mood to finance another. Defeated, Schultz offered the team to wealthy executives around town. Then he sold it to Bennett.

Because the new owners came from Oklahoma, locals assumed they were intent on moving the Sonics there. Unaccustomed to the glare of big-city media, Bennett reverted to his default position in almost any endeavor: Be circumspect, say little, acquire information. “People interpreted his reticence, his quietness, as ‘He must be holding something back,’ ” says Peter von Reichbauer, a council member in King County, which includes Seattle. “Decisions were made instantly, both in the media and in the bars and taverns, ‘This is a guy from out of state who wants to take this team out of state.’ ” But while Oklahoma City was always an option, Bennett insisted that the group’s preference was a new arena somewhere in greater Seattle. “We had to make the business work,” he says now. “It wasn’t like we bought it for $20 million two decades ago. We’d just spent $350 million.” He coveted the business potential of a metropolitan area of 3.3 million people and a long-established franchise that had lacked the means to maximize its revenue. And after years of shielding his three children from the public fascination of what it means to be Gaylord heirs, he was wary of subjecting them to the scrutiny that putting his team in Oklahoma City would invite.

Bennett says he thought that negotiating as an outsider would be a strength, not a weakness. “Howard didn’t have leverage,” he says, whereas he had an arena waiting. Watching his Sonics lose a nail-biter to Portland before a sellout crowd in the first game of what the newspapers were calling the Bennett Era, he felt giddy. “I remember thinking: We did it. We saved basketball for Puget Sound. I had this vision of our new building. I could taste it.”

HOW TO DETERMINE WHICH CITIES are best suited for big-league sports seems obvious. Notwithstanding various local and regional affections (Edmonton’s for hockey, Green Bay’s for football), shouldn’t franchises be located where the largest fan base and greatest corporate presence can support them? And yet, the competitive and financial success of some small-market franchises indicates that other factors also matter. “The Yankees don’t win the World Series every year,” says Aubrey McClendon, the C.E.O. of Chesapeake Energy, who owns 20 percent of the Thunder. “Los Angeles doesn’t have an N.F.L. team. It isn’t just about size.”

Still, Seattle, the nation’s 14th-largest television market, isn’t merely far larger than Oklahoma City, the 45th. It’s the home of several major corporate players in America’s Internet economy and of manufacturers and top brick-and-mortar retailers, a diversity that would seem to protect it from the boom-and-bust cycles that have plagued Oklahoma City. Seattle is regarded as the gateway to Asia and all those nascent basketball fans in China. And it’s a terrific place to live, or even visit. Few N.B.A. players, executives or beat writers are excited about swapping their Seattle visits for road trips to Oklahoma. “When a city’s in the league for 40 years and everyone really likes it, it’s going to be missed, no question,” says P. J. Carlesimo, the Thunder’s head coach, who came to Seattle before last season to lead a rebuilding effort centered on the lanky, 6-foot-9 sharpshooter Kevin Durant, the second player chosen in the 2007 draft. Those with historic ties to the franchise are especially saddened. “There’s a soul and a history to basketball in Seattle,” says George Karl, the Denver Nuggets’ head coach, who previously coached the Sonics. “I know owners want to make more money, but is the way to do it really by making the sport more business-oriented?”

But does the Sonics’ move to Oklahoma City make sense from a business perspective? For the fourth time since 1985, the N.B.A. has traded down to a smaller market. That trend risks shrinking its television footprint and stunting the value of its other franchises. If a substantial number of fans follow the sport because a local team provides a vested interest, then the league has lost millions of potential viewers, T-shirt wearers and ticket buyers. “It’s important to have bigger markets,” Shinn told me. “That increases the chances for television revenues, that’s obvious. And the bigger the market, the better the chance that you succeed.”

Such logic isn’t lost on Stern. He remains adamant that N.B.A. franchises must remain in the nation’s largest cities. He ticks them off: “Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles. . . . If I’ve forgotten one, I don’t mean to. The Top 10.” But he also acknowledges that the other dozen and a half teams might be better situated as the lone big-league option in a small market rather than fighting popular baseball and football teams for corporate and fan support and media attention. That means successful N.B.A. markets like San Antonio, Sacramento, Portland and Salt Lake City. It doesn’t mean Seattle. “I wake up every morning thanking the Good Lord that we’re the only game in town,” says Peter Holt, who owns the San Antonio Spurs.

Like Oklahoma City, Seattle once craved the status that comes with a big-league designation. In 1967, it secured an expansion franchise to play in a five-year-old arena that had been upgraded with taxpayer money to attract a team, a situation almost precisely analogous to Oklahoma City with its Ford Center. Seattle was different then, pre-Starbucks, pre-Nirvana, on the fringe and without the Seahawks or the Mariners. Getting the N.B.A., the city’s hierarchy felt, would put the region on the map. Once it gained a reputation as a desirable place to live, and entertainment choices multiplied, the Sonics found themselves struggling to generate the depth of interest they had previously taken for granted. “The Seattle of today is not the Seattle of the 1980s or even the 1990s,” says Anne Levinson, a former deputy mayor who heads the group that owns the Seattle Storm of the Women’s National Basketball Association. That arc of maturation has left the N.B.A. behind.

As in every market on the continent with franchises in multiple leagues, Seattle’s football and baseball teams have been its priority. The Sonics, tradition-rich as they were, ran a distant third, and the civic and corporate resources needed to support big-league sports may not have extended that deep. In Oklahoma City, by contrast, the team will have almost no competition for the sports-entertainment dollar beyond college programs, and residents are hungry for a team. “The voters in Oklahoma City passed $126 million in improvements to the arena,” says Gavin Maloof, whose family owns the N.B.A.’s Sacramento Kings. “That shows me they really want the team.” Maloof understands the allure of uncontested territory. The Kings struggled alongside baseball and football teams in Cincinnati and Kansas City, finding prosperity only in 1985 when Greg Lukenbill, then the owner, moved the team to Sacramento, a growing city devoid of big-league sports. “The owner of a franchise has to be able to make money,” Maloof says. “I’m for whatever the owner wants.”

ONE WARM TUESDAY IN OKLAHOMA CITY last spring, Bennett presided over a presentation to N.B.A. executives and three members of its relocation committee. First they toured the Ford Center, which Bennett had gussied up with a showcase suite, an expanded shopping concourse and other improvements. “I wanted to show them that we knew what the N.B.A. standard was like, and we were prepared to go even further,” he says. Later, the group convened in a hotel ballroom that had been transformed into a stage set. Seated in an arc around the participants were Mick Cornett and his two predecessors as mayor; the state’s last two governors; C.E.O.’s of local corporations; the athletic directors of O.U. and Oklahoma State; even the Sooners’ football coach, Bob Stoops, and Tulsa’s mayor. The unanimity was striking. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Stern says. Soon after getting the committee’s recommendation, the league’s owners voted on Bennett’s plan to relocate the Sonics to Oklahoma. It passed 28-2.

These days, Oklahoma City is exultant. “You’re going to be hearing about Oklahoma City now in a way that you’ve never heard about it before,” McClendon says. On the radio and in The Oklahoman, the talk is of the Wunderkind general manager, Sam Presti, who is 31, building a winning team around Kevin Durant and succeeding on the model of the Spurs, a small-market franchise that more than holds its own against the competition. Yet Bennett still seems reluctant to celebrate his — and the city’s — good fortune. As he walked me through the team’s hastily constructed office space, past empty boxes and earnest young executives peddling sponsorship packages, he seemed more like a disinterested tax assessor than a city father who has pulled his hometown into the upper echelon.

One explanation for such detachment could be the lingering effect of the abuse he received in Seattle at the hands of talk-radio jocks, newspaper columnists and outright wackos, jarring attacks that ranged from shouted insults to death threats. “It tested both my faith and my own self-confidence,” he says. Another is his temperament: for the public face of a sports franchise, he’s almost preternaturally private. Don’t expect Bennett to rant like the Dallas Mavericks’ Mark Cuban or spend like the New York Knicks’ James Dolan; he runs his basketball team with the same measured strategies he uses to manage his investments.

And I couldn’t avoid the sense that, despite selling 13,000 season tickets in five days and reaching the first-year target for merchandise sales at the Thunder’s downtown store in less than a month, he’s daunted by his investment in Oklahoma City. What if, after all the chest-pounding and horn-blowing, it isn’t ready to support a team for the long term after all? “The worst thing we could do,” he admits, “is to bring a team to Oklahoma City and have it fail.” Such an outcome would be disastrous financially for Bennett, and especially for his partners, who have suffered heavy losses in the ongoing financial crisis. More tellingly, it would also undo much of the work this generation of civic leadership has done to alter the city’s image.

When I asked him if that was his concern, he answered by talking about the pride and enthusiasm with which Oklahoma City has embraced the team. “Anything we ask of anyone in this city, it’s done,” he told me. “And it’s done in the right spirit, and it’s done professionally, and with respect.” He shook his head. “We have an awful lot to live up to.” Whatever the result of Wednesday’s game, Oklahoma City will have won something, at least symbolically. But though the template is there for N.B.A. success, and a team that contends within a few years is likely to continue to be received warmly, the market remains small for big-league sports, and the current economic conditions could hardly be worse. Perhaps Bennett is wise to be circumspect. It may well be that taking a team from Seattle, as improbable as that seemed, was the easy part. n

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