Selling out a limited number of games in what amounts to a college stadium means your ready to support a team? This is a very Memphis Grizzlies type move but without the glamour of moving to Memphis . Bad move for the NBA all around, and should be a tough sell to the other owners.
That's pretty tasteless and classless humor, thad...my cousin happened to be at work at the Murrah Federal Bldg when it was blown up, btw, thanks.
Since The Bombers nickname didn't go too well, I'm sure nobody wants to hear my name suggestion for the Nets when they move to NYC.
Ford Center is not "what amounts to a college stadium" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Center FYI the Hornets averaged more fans than the Rockets last year.
My first thought was: Why give a wimpy little city like Oklahoma City an NBA franchise? Then I looked it up and learned Seattle has less than 50,000 more people than OKC. Other interesting stats... Largest cities (by population/June 2006 census) without an NBA franchise: San Diego --#8 largest city in the U.S. San Jose -- #10 Jacksonville -- #12 Columbus -- #15 Austin --#16 Fort Worth -- #18 Baltimore -- #19 El Paso -- #21 Seattle (soon) -- #23 Smallest cities with an NBA franchise: New Orleans -- #83 (population: 223,000k) Orlando -- #85 (population: 220,000) Salt Lake City -- #124 (population: 179,000) A few cities with larger populations than Salt Lake City: Moreno Valley, CA Hialeah, FL Amarillo, TX Gilbert, AZ Yonkers, NY Chesapeake, VA Anchorage, AK Corpus Christi, TX
It is really dumb to look at city limits. You should look at the overall market/metro area. If city limits was the case, then Atlanta shouldn't have any sports teams because it only has about 440,000 in it. Atlanta's market/metro area has five million in it.
Not only does the Ford Center seat over 19,500 for basketball with over 3,300 club seats, 49 luxury suites and 7 party suites, but I'm sure OKC will offer a sweetheart lease deal that will make the city even more attractive to the team owner (and I'm sure they'll be doing close to 750K in attendance for at least the first few years) Part of the problem in Seattle is not only the stadium itself but also the existing lease. The sad thing is that cities and fans never win these battles. Even what I would consider the very successful "Save Our Rockets" campaign that Clutch and Jeff and others undertook wouldn't have ultimately been successful, in my opinion, had the new arena not materialized. Maybe there's still time to get something done to keep the Sonics in Seattle. As much as I like OKC and was impressed by their support of the Hornets, I hate to see any team move.
even though i like the name "Oklahoma Bombers" how about "Oklahoma T-MAC" <== think about what T-Mac stands for...
This is true. Metro area is the ACTUAL size of the city. For example, Houston and Chicago both have very similar city population I believe, about 2.5 million each. However, Chicago has about 9 million metro population to Houstons 5 million metro population.
Anyways, this is relevant because the METRO size determines the Market size. Seattle has a much bigger market than OKC. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_metropolitan_areas
