The Oklahoma City… Non-SuperSonics?

In case you haven’t heard yet, after 41 years, the Seattle SuperSonics’ basketball franchise has up and moved to Oklahoma City, the city that recently housed the Hornets for a year due to Katrina.

I’m not particularly concerned with this in either direction; here are my thoughts off the top of my head: The Sonics have some of the sweetest throwbacks ever (the late ’70s ones with the logo on them at the top right of this post, courtesy of Chris Creamer), it’ll only bring basketball god Kevin Durant back closer to his home state, typically anything with the word “Oklahoma” in it sucks, etc. But there are couple interesting things about it…

• 1. Why Oklahoma City?

  The obvious answer is that the fans responded so well when the Hornets went there this past year. What IS actually interesting, from a business standpoint, is that they took the team from the 14th largest market in the nation to the 52nd. Business shrewd? I guess there’s a lot to say for basketball support, e.g. there may be less people, but more of those people will go to a basketball game. But come on! Did you realize, Puerto Rico, Providence, RI and Middlesex, NJ all have larger markets? Who would have guessed? Heck, we have Toronto-based teams in almost all the major sports, why not drop a team down in Puerto Rico?

• 2. What will they become?

  One of my favorite sites in the world, Uni Watch (via ESPN), has announced a submission contest to design a new team name, logo, and uniform. I think that’s brilliant. For a long time all I wanted to do was design sports-related things: logos, unis, brochures, you name it. So I think I may participate just to see what happens. it’s not like any of it is actually going to influence the NBA (it looks like they’re going to go with Outlaws or Barons or something like that), but it’ll still be fun. Any team name suggestions out there?