Scenes From a Funeral

With smart money on it being the last game the 41-year-old Sonic franchise would ever play in Seattle, the Supes pulled out an unlikely, come from behind 99-95 victory over the Dallas Mavericks Sunday night, a bittersweet end to a mostly bitter season. In toppling two playoff bound teams in their final two home games of the year, the Supes offered Seattle fans a glimpse of what could be a very bright future two or three years down the line, the problem being that line might soon form in Oklahoma instead of the Great Northwest.

Shouts of "save our Sonics" were far more frequent than at any point this year, as were lewd, homemade t-shirts directed at Clay Bennett (most hard-core: "Bennett Sucks Off Squatch"). When video of Gary Payton, who sat near the baseline, was projected on the Jumbotron, the crowd gave himi a three-minute standing ovation that essentially interrupted play. However, the half-assed ineptitude of "fan appreciation month" continued, as whoever is charged with spelling names on said Jumbotron biffed on the surname of Sheryl Swoopes (they forgot the "e"), one of the newest members of the Storm and one of the three or four greatest female basketball players of all time.

Toward the top of the Key, in section 210, there was one sign that said it all. It featured a Starbucks logo with a big red slash through it. Bitch all you want about Bennett and David Stern, but the Sonics' future in Seattle was cast into doubt the moment Howard Schultz sold the team to a group of Oklahoma City investors. This maneuver was Schultz's way of saying "fuck you" to local politicians. What it ended up being was a fuck you to fans, a fuck you to the city that helped make him a very rich man and where his McDonald's of fancypants coffee is headquartered (Schultz declined SW's request to be interviewed regarding the Sonics' plight). Late in the season, there was a lot of talk of fans walking out at the end of the third quarter, en masse. Instead, they should walk out of Starbucks forever.