I can remember sitting on the living room floor, eyes closed, praying the Seattle SuperSonics didn’t win the 2007 NBA Draft lottery.
It’s a weird feeling cheering against your hometown team. I was there in the very top row at the Seattle Center Coliseum as a 9-year-old kid when the Sonics closed out the Utah Jazz in a win-or-go-home Game 5 of a first-round series in 1993.
Walking back to the car, I was holding these Sonics- colored pom-poms that I would wave at every car driving by. Most of the time, I would get a honk in return. The entire city was celebrating together. It was the coolest thing ever.
Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp were my two favorite basketball players. The Glove and the Reignman. One never stopped talking trash and the other kept dunking on people.
Many nights, the last thing I would hear before falling asleep was Kevin Calabro perfectly painting the image from my tiny bedside radio of the latest alley-oop dunk pass from Payton to Kemp that you knew ESPN was quickly scrambling to add to the highlight package for SportsCenter.
It was nearly 15 years later, most of which I had now spent living in Hawaii, when that lottery came down to the Sonics and the Blazers.
Greg Oden, the 7-foot monster center from Ohio State, and Kevin Durant, the skinny, 6-foot-9 kid from Texas who played like a point guard, were the prized players that were going 1-2 in whichever order.
I had seen Durant play in the ‘Iolani Classic for Montrose Christian and couldn’t believe what I was watching. How does someone so tall play … like Allen Iverson?
Seattle had taken three straight 7-foot busts in the previous three drafts. Robert Swift out of high school in California, Johan Petro from France and Mouhamed Sene from Senegal.
Remember them? I do, unfortunately.
There was no way they would pass up on another 7-footer, especially one like Oden, despite his injury concerns. So when the envelope was opened to reveal the No. 2 pick, I was ecstatic. They wouldn’t get the chance to screw this draft up.
Oden went first, Durant came to Seattle, and I had a guy I thought would end up as one of the greatest NBA players of all time on my team. I imagine it is like how a Spurs fan felt drafting Wembanyama, or a Magic fan getting Shaq, or a New Orleans fan drafting Zion. Wait, scratch that last one off the list.
Unfortunately, it only lasted a year. The SuperSonics were under new ownership after Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz sold a team for $350 million that less than two decades later has an estimated value nearing $4 billion.
Heady play, Howard.
New owner Clay Bennett took the team to Oklahoma City a little later, after saying he wouldn’t, and he became the most hated man in Seattle.
To this day, the Thunder are the most hated professional sports team in Seattle — not the 49ers, not the Rams, not the Houston Astros.
It’s the team that left. How could anyone who loved the Sonics more than any other sports team in the Pacific Northwest stick with the franchise that left them high and dry for Oklahoma City of all places?
My friends never stop teasing me about it. Had I stayed in Seattle, my fandom would certainly be different, but the problem was, I believed.
I believed in Kevin Durant.
When they made Russell Westbrook the No. 4 pick in the draft a year later, and he had to put on a Sonics hat even though they were off to Oklahoma City, I believed even more.
Then they scooped up this Serge Ibaka kid from the Congo later in that draft, and a year later stayed out on the West Coast with their first pick, selecting James Harden from Arizona State.
My team was scooping up all of the top Pac-12 guys??? I just can’t quit you.
By this point, I was thinking not one, not two, not three, not four, not five NBA championships. Ultimately, they made one NBA Finals appearance and then traded Harden primarily because they were in a small market city and didn’t have the money they most surely would have had they stayed in Seattle.
Understanding all of that, the NBA Finals kick off Thursday with Oklahoma City back for the first time since that one appearance from Durant and Company in 2012.
Durant, Westbrook and Harden are now Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren, and this Thunder team might go down as one of the best of all time.
They enter the Finals with the best scoring differential of all-time, better than them all, even the ’96 Bulls that left me in tears after beating the Sonics in six games.
SGA can become the first player since Shaquille O’Neal with the Lakers in 2000 to win an NBA Finals and an NBA scoring title in the same season. He also won the thing called the Most Valuable Player Award.
I might be the only Sonics fan in the world rooting for the Thunder these next two weeks. I still have never been quite sure how to feel about it, but I do know this:
I wake up every day hoping never to be a Thunder fan again, because when that day comes, that means Seattle will have a professional basketball team once again, something the best sports city in the country should have had all along.
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Reach Billy Hull at bhull@staradvertiser.com.
