New Sonics Owner Bennett Assembles an Arena Team

SEATTLE - According to the Seattle Times Eastside bureau reporter Ashley Bach, the new Sonics owner, Clay Bennett, has assembled a team of bankers and construction consultants to formally explore all opportunities to locate a home for the Sonics to play in after the 2010 season. Bennett has also hired a public affairs specialist Jim Kneeland to act as a local liaison.

Is Jim Kneeland the same guy that contributed to Greg Nickels 2004 re-election campaign and his 2004 re-election campaign?

$600 James A. Kneeland :   Pacific Public Affairs, Consultant

Not that there's nothing wrong with it, just asking.

Is this the same Jim Kneelend that was the spokesman for Seattle developer David Sabey?

Same Kneeland that works for Pacific Public Affairs PR firm?

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels wants the team to stay at KeyArena, and he had lunch with Bennett during a visit earlier this month.

"We just think the Key still makes sense," Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis said Thursday.
The Seattle Times.

Let's understand something here, If Mayor Greg Nickels, and Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis think they can spin this and have the Sonics look like they are the bad guys for going to another site, then they are flat out stupid. The fact is that they have three stone cold offers for a 44 year old building and not much else. That will get old and become and easy target for the newspapers to beat them up with and it isn't much of a position to have since the new owner is thinking bigger. It just makes the city look smaller for not rising to the challenge of making this work for the Sonics in this city. It becomes one of many things the city leadership can't get done. Do everybody a favor and get the hell out of the way. Key Arena is your new white elephant, Nick Licata killed this before it got started. You might as well start throwing him under the political bus right now.

The Key Arena isn't made for NHL Hockey and would cost quite a bit to restructure in order for another tenant (like hockey) to be able to use that facility. On top of that, the city council insists on having the tenant pay for upgrading the building and hand the city a significant amount of revenue from the enhancements when that same tenant can go some place else and not have to pay as much rent. This is a prime situation for somebody with a lot of worthless land to plant an arena on a portion of it in order for the rest of the land to inflate in value. The Seattle Center site is dead, the land values have been played out, capitalized.

Look around the city, the area, for a spot that could use a landmark and let's get this thing done.

BTW:
Tonight on FoxSports Northwest The Sonics rolled out a commercial featuring Chris Wilcox, "Wilcox is back", "29 games", "68 dunks".
Great commercial, they roll some text and a sequence of ferocious dunks, that's a ticket seller.
Click HERE to see 1 minute and 30 second highlight reel of Chris Wilcox, RealPlayer file. There are some nice passes from Luke Ridnour, some drives to the rim, and a nice pass off a high-low play with Nick Collison tossing a nice pass to Wilcox cutting backdoor. Plenty of good passers on the team, great shooters and smart players for coach Bob Hill to use. This should be a great season.