The City of Seattle and Women's Basketball Club of Seattle, LLC agreed yesterday to renew their lease of Key Arena, keeping the Storm in town for ten more years.

The exact financials of the deal haven't been obtained yet and the deal still awaits full city council approval.

Having the Storm in town fills the venue for at least 17 home games in 2009, not counting playoffs and preseason.

Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis naturally described the arrangement as a "win-win" for both parties. With the lack of appropriately sized sporting venues, there wasn't any talk of the Storm skipping town for someplace where the pastures and center-court decals were greener.

Furthermore, having emerged from the shadow of the men's team, Ceis opined that the Storm's bottom-line might improve.

"Under their old arrangement it was tough. Their lease was through the Sonics so they didn't have access to advertising revenue and concessions," Ceis said.

Double Dribble: Even having Sue Bird and Lauren Jackson playing ball at the Key, there is still a huge hole in the arena's event schedule now that the Sonics are sucking prairie dust in Oklahoma City.

Compounding this problem, the Seattle Thunderbirds have moved to Kent and are playing in the brand-new, shiny and taxpayer funded ShoWare Center, a.k.a. the Kent Events Center. We're informed the ShoW smells good too.

In order to stem the exodus, last October the city signed a one-year agreement with AEG Facilities to book events for Key Arena.

According to their website, AEG is one of the "leading sports and entertainment presenters in the world", owning rights to the STAPLES Center in Los Angeles, The Rose Garden in Portland and the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey. Locally, they manage the WaMu Theater at Qwest Field.

Prior to this, event scheduling was shared between the Sonics and city staff at Seattle Center.

Seattle University, now a Division I team, has begun playing its home games at the Key and is, at the moment, the arena's second-largest tenant.

Her reason: she wants to focus all her energy that year on returning the gold medal to Australian paws, providing yet further evidence of how dramatically different the NBA and WNBA economic models are. Provided she's not bluffing, this sure sucks for the Storm (hat tip to TrueHoop).

With the clock winding down and the Storm trailing the LA Sparks by 10, point guard Sue Bird kicked her game into high gear--a fade-away, three-point jumper, followed almost immediately by a drive under the basket. At 2 minutes she dropped another field goal, getting the Storm within three. But then she made a mistake, pulling a foul too early and giving Spark Marie Ferdinand-Harris two free shots. Almost as soon as she committed the foul, Bird danced back, hands in the air, praying the refs didn't see.

Tweeeeeet!

Bird didn't yell or dig the ground, she crouched on the court and let out a short laugh. Apparently, trying to single-handedly keep your team in the WNBA playoffs is a kinda funny.

The 64-71 loss to Los Angeles wasn't exactly a surprise. Starter Sheryl Swoopes was supposed to be on the injured list and playing well below her ability. And star Lauren Jackson's ankle surgery left her dressed in black on the bench. Having Jackson out was especially painful.

The only thing the Storm had going for them was their notorious fan base. At 16-1, Seattle had the best regular season home record in the league. The crowd at Key Arena (ridiculously small, c'mon people this was our one shot at a title all year) is always perfectly synced, intensely loud, and a touch crazy.

I took my seat next to Bob Machholz. Wearing black sweats and a green checked flannel and reading Stephen King's Lisey's Story. "My god," I thought. "This must be the first disinterested person ever to attend one of the these games." I figured he made the trip for his daughter Megan, sitting next to him.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Starting at tip off it was a constant stream of verbal explosions:

"Let's go Storm!"
"Push!"
"What are you calling?!"
"Booooo!"
"Woo, woo, woooo!" (stompstompstompstomp)

Megan, an aspiring point guard starting her freshman year at Mt. Si High School in North Bend, loves watching Bird run the court but kept her cool next to her very excited dad.

"Without Lauren [Jackson] it's going to be hard for us to win," Machholz told me at the half. He was right--too hard. Still, it was an exciting cap to a solid season, which is far more than any other local professional athletes can say.

Last night's Storm game was weird. For starters, injured Houston Comet swingwoman Latasha Byears was rocking a huge "B" medalliion and...a really loud pair of Coogi jeans. Did anyone else not realize that Coogi had diversified into realms other than its signature Cosby sweater? Anyway, back to the weirdness: last night's game was the Storm's first after a month-long break for the Olympics. Do you know any other sport that would take a month off to let the cream of its crop take a Chinese holiday? Speaking of that Chinese holiday, Swin Cash was held out of the starting lineup for missing that month's worth of practice in order to moonlight as an Olympic television correspondent. Lastly, Sue Bird had but one assist and zero rebounds (she averages about six and three). For this, there's a very good explanation.

With Lauren Jackson out for the season (although buzz is she's going to try and come back before the playoffs, which is far more optimistic than the original prognosis) and Sheryl Swoopes and Yolanda Griffith really showing their mileage, the Storm have but two reliable offensive options: Bird and Cash. With Cash not in the starting lineup -- and, frankly, pretty rusty when she was on the floor -- the Storm's offense was all about Bird. To make this adjustment, Tanisha Wright essentially handled point guard duties, while Bird ran off screens trying to get opened. The ploy worked: Bird had 22 points, the only Storm starter to reach double figures in a 66-49 win over the 14-13 Comets, running Seattle's record to 14-1 at the Key (18-9 overall).

But the real highlight last night was the Storm defense. That 49-point total isn't a typo; Houston shot 28% from the field for the game, and all-star forward Tina Thompson was held to single digit scoring. This came in spite of some awful officiating that saw all of the Storm's bigs -- Griffith, Ashley Robinson, and Camille Little -- plagued by serious foul trouble throughout the game (Little ended up fouling out). The refs whistled twice as many fouls on Seattle as they did on Houston -- sort of the Bizarro version of home-cookin'. And yet, the Storm still won handily, thanks in no small part to power forward Shyra Ely's steely third quarter D.

Ultimately, there might be a silver lining to Jackson's absence. If the Storm can play .500 ball between now and season's end without her (they're 4-2 without her as is), they're going to make the playoffs, and they may even secure home court advantage for at least one round. And obviously, with the Storm, home court advantage means a lot. So does Jackson. If she can make it back on time for the playoffs, she'll rejoin a team whose reserves have been baptized by fire in her absence, and will doubtless come out better for it. Don't call it the imperfect Storm yet, folks -- it's all about the ice on Lo-Jack's ankle at this point.

Lauren Jackson will have post-Olympic ankle surgery that will keep her out until at least the WNBA Finals. But even tossing out the prospect of the Storm making the Finals without her is a crock -- the team's win-now veteran roster was constructed with very little margin for error (read: crappy bench). Oh well.

Swin Cash, a dime by any standard, is missing Storm practices while the WNBA takes a month off for letting its gals compete in Beijing. Sue Bird and Lauren Jackson are also missing practice. So why's Cash getting fined while Bird and Jackson aren't? Because Cash is an Olympic television correspondent, while Bird and Lo-Jack are playing in the Olympics. Interesting stuff.

I seriously doubt it, but that's what the headline -- "focus switches to keeping Storm [in KeyArena]" -- of this peculiar P.I. story insinuates. I get that the Storm will have to shoulder a larger burden of operating costs, but just where exactly are they fixing to move to? Kennewick? Hoquiam? Wenatchee? For a team like the Storm, KeyArena is like Buckingham Palace. There should be no talk of municipal pot-sweetening here, much as I love the ladies.

The WNBA season is substantially shorter than the NBA's; only this year, it's a little misleading, as the women's league will take the entirety of August off in order to allow its athletes to compete in the Olympics. But still, it's fitting that they have seven-day contracts in the WNBA (as opposed to the men's 10-dayers). And today, former Meadowdale High and UW star Kristen O'Neill signed one of them, with the Storm.

Yeah, that's kind of the problem.

From the floor at Key Arena, I am endlessly impressed by the few, the proud, the Storm fans. Many of the seats go unfilled, but if you close your eyes you'd never know it. And these aren't people showing up for a game because it seems like a fun thing to do once or twice: they're devout. As girl-from-Down Undah Lauren Jackson was introduced, the announcer yelled out: "Auzzie, Auzzie, Auzzie."

"Oi! Oi! Oi!" the crowd roared back without hesitation or a prompt from the jumbotron. The stoic cop next to me guarding the visitors' locker room entrance let slip with a "get it in there" as Sheryl Swoopes drove for a lay-in. She did, the crowd went nuts.

Watching the Storm obliterate the Washington Mystics 64 - 49 at home, it's easy to think you're witnessing some of the greatest women's basketball ever played--sure the perimeter shooting is a little weak and new acquisition Camille Little's 2-point Key Arena debut was something of a non-event. But the girls in green play an aggressive game, keeping ahead of the rebounds and forcing the ball to the hoop where the towering Jackson is ready to sink it.

But this is something it appears they can only do with their frenetic fans. Overall the Storm are 9 - 7, good enough for third in the seven-team Western Conference. But most of those wins come on the court at Key Arena, where they've lost only once. That means they've only won once on the road. It's great to have at least one team that will perform for the fans, but if they're going to have a shot at a title, the Storm need to be able to post wins without a chorus of "Oi! Oi! Oi!"

We're a day late and a dollar short here with this news, but the Storm continued their win-or-else quest for a title this year by trading a second-round draft pick to Atlanta for 6'2" forward Camille Little, who will provide some much-needed depth on Seattle's injury-prone front line.. Full press release after the jump.