Can you hear that? If you listen closely, you can hear thousands of teeth grinding all the way over in Seattle. As expected, the Oklahoma City Thunder are proving their worth in the NBA 2023/24, and this is always a sore subject for Seattle basketball fans.
It wasn’t too long ago that the Oklahoma City Thunder were playing as the Seattle Supersonics – the pride of Seattle for forty-one years between 1967 and 2008. While Seattle has the Redhawks in the NCAA, there must be a bit of resentment whenever they see the Thunder doing well in the NBA.
The Seattle Supersonics
There are plenty of iconic NBA history moments, but one of the most substantial has to be the relocation of the Seattle Supersonics, when they left the windy streets of Seattle for the Oklahoma sunshine in 2008. Their story began in the 1960s, when Los Angeles business tycoons Sam Schulman and Eugene V. Klein were awarded an NBA franchise for Seattle. Having had success with the AFL side, San Diego Chargers, Schulman believed it was time to honor Seattle with its basketball team, named after the city’s famous ties to aviation.
They began playing in October 1967, kicking off their campaign with a 144-116 loss against the Golden State Warriors in San Francisco. Unperturbed, they returned to seal a win against the San Diego Rockets just over a week later, clinching the victory in overtime with a score of 117-110. Finishing the season with a 23-59 record, the Supersonics well and truly earned their place in the NBA history books.
The Arrival of a Supersonic Superstar
It wasn’t until Lenny Wilkens joined, however, that people started to take notice. With the all-rounder guard Walt Hazzard carrying the Supersonics through much of their first season, it didn’t take long for him to be snapped up by one of the more established NBA teams, the Atlanta Hawks, to whom he was traded before the 1968/69 season started. In place of Hazzard, the Supersonics were awarded Lenny Wilkens, which became one of the best trades in the club's history.
Wilkens was an immediate superstar, bringing a brave, all-around game to the Supersonics in a season that saw him averaging 22.4 points, 6.2 rebounds, and 8.2 assists per game. He was so well-liked that he even replaced manager Bianchi during the off-season, serving the team as both a player and a coach.
Success and Decline
When Wilkens left the team in 1974, he left them in a much better place than he found them, although that wasn’t immediately evident. After leaving, the Supersonics fell to a 26-56 record, prompting many fans to call for his return. However, they needn’t have worried because the rest of the decade was a complete success. In the following season, they made it to the playoffs for the first time, and toward the end of the decade, they even secured their first and only NBA title against the Washington Bullets.
This was to be their crowning achievement, as, throughout the 80s and 90s, they went through a period of decline. While the team of 1995/96 looked to take them out of that decline, for two seasons, Seattle was a Western Conference powerhouse, with players like Detlef Schrempf, Sam Perkins, and Hersey Hawkins taking the team to the 1996 NBA finals – things were not great behind the scenes.
Management was struggling to secure public funding for a new arena in the Seattle area, and the NBA had a strong inclination that they should be relocated to Oklahoma. They eventually did, offering a $45 million settlement with the city of Seattle to cover their lease at the KeyArena. The rest, as they say, is history. But that’s a bit of history before the history, when the Oklahoma City Thunder were the shining lights of an entirely different city.
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