Oh, the precipitous decline of the Sonics' popularity. The legislature twice rejected their bid for $200 million, the Seattle City Council slammed them with stringent subsidy requirements, and even Seattle sports talk radio barely shrugged at the news of their June 19 sale and threatened departure to Oklahoma City. A June poll of Seattleites showed that a resounding 78 percent of the city would rather dump the Sonics than pay for an arena renovation with taxes.
Now meet that other 22 percent.
The Seattle citizens who want the Sonics to stay are not all from the Eastside and, no, they're not all meathead jocks, either. The founders of the fledgling Save Our Sonics (SOS) are upbeat, desperate basketball fans who are convinced that by running a positive-energy, "Go Team!" campaign, they can win over the naysayers. They want a new 20,000-seat arena—in Bellevue—and they're supportive of a .5 percent tax on hotel rooms, rental cars, and restaurants, and a 10 percent tax on admission tickets to pay for it.
SOS insists that the Sonics' popularity in the region (if not the city) is still high. "You cannot believe the buzz in Bellingham when this happened," says Steven Pyeatt, who founded the group. Pyeatt is a 48-year-old (though he protests, "I'm 38 and holding!") with a small mustache who runs a web-hosting company. That might explain the sleek Save Our Sonics website, which is designed replete with animated lightning flashing, "Keep Our Teams Here!"
The group's paragraph-long petition doesn't mention taxes or any specific plans. Instead, about 2,000 fans have signed their names under a line imploring the legislature to "please do everything in your power to keep our teams here." (An anti-Sonics Seattle initiative, which purportedly netted 24,300 signatures, is still awaiting verification for the ballot.)
A few small kids shot hoops under the bright sun Saturday morning, August 12, on a court in Wedgwood's Burke-Gilman Park surrounded by blackberry bushes and marked with a huge Sonics logo. The excessively blond Sonics dance team stood around in matching black shirts. Two dozen parents and neighbors hung out nearby, munching on free Danishes while waiting in a short line for an autograph from Wally Walker. This was a stop on the grandly titled "Sonics Legends Tour" and the SOS members had tagged along to do a little campaigning. "This is one of over 20 courts the Sonics have donated to community parks," Pyeatt quickly pointed out.
The men and women who form the core of SOS are mostly middle-aged and mostly from Ballard. On Saturday, they handed out colorful fliers and got a couple signatures.
While it's absent from their petition, SOS does have a suggestion for the legislature: a multiuse arena built in Bellevue, one that would be busy several nights a week not just with basketball, but "hockey and all the concert[s] and ice shows that are passing us up right now."
Chris Van Dyke, leader of the anti-Sonics signature drive, I-91, describes the pro-Sonics groups as "a very vocal extreme minority of season-ticket holders." (Indeed, some founding members like Pyeatt are season-ticket holders.)
While the Yahoo group for SOS boasts a meager 121 members, group leaders say their "Action Alert!" mailing list numbers around 1,500.
Certainly SOS has rational justifications about how the teams are good for the economy and the community, but really it boils down to intangibles. Denise Kilgore, the volunteer coordinator for SOS, an administrative assistant who wears a Seattle Storm sweatshirt, describes the WNBA players as heroes and role models—strong women. Pyeatt waxes nostalgic about growing up attending high-energy games and laments Seattle's possible loss. "If we start losing pieces of the puzzle, you can never assemble it again." 
