Slate's gift to Seattle:

You might want to ask yourself at this point how is it that the Thunder ended up playing in such a small and relatively poor place like Oklahoma City? Wouldn't it make more sense for an NBA team to be in a place like, say, Seattle that has a much larger and more prosperous population? Well it turns out that there was an NBA team in Seattle and a consortium of rich Oklahomans led by Clayton Bennett purchased it. Since these guys lived in Oklahoma, they wanted to move the team to Oklahoma where they live. Which is nice for them, except Oklahoma turns out to not have any large media markets.

Them's the breaks, I guess. The fact that the Lakers (rather than, say, the Knicks) have the richest local TV contract in the league is a reminder that there's more to the business of basketball than being located in a large city. But a successful basketball team located in Seattle (3.5 million people in the MSA) is going to be more lucrative than a team located in Oklahoma City (1.3 million people in the MSA), which makes it more financially worthwhile to invest in things like a long-term contract for James Harden.

I have always wondered how a mediocre city that's completely under a GOP regime could afford to maintain something as expensive as a professional basketball team. And although the city has not been hit hard by the recession, it's not a place that's going to grow because people are not keen on moving there. I have been to Oklahoma City, I have seen it with my own eyes: The place makes Salt Lake City look like Paris. Yet, they have the Sonics and we don't.