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This Day In Sports…October 13, 1967:
The new Seattle SuperSonics make their regular season debut in a 144-116 road loss to the San Francisco Warriors at the Cow Palace. Guard Walt Hazzard scored the first points in franchise history and finished the game with 30. A week later, the Sonics would play their first game at the Seattle Center Coliseum, falling to another expansion team, the San Diego Rockets. But Seattle would record its first victory the following night in a 117-110 overtime thriller on the Rockets’ home floor.
Puget Sound was excited, but when you look back on it, it’s shocking to see that attendance at the Sonics home opener was only 4,473. The NBA then wasn’t what it is now, and expectations for the team that season were low. NBA teams were able to protect seven players in the expansion draft, so players far down the bench were the only ones available to new franchises. The Sonics, who averaged only 6,168 per game at the Coliseum that first season, tried playing games in Portland, Tacoma, Spokane, Olympia, and even Vancouver, B.C., and it was tough for them to take root.
The Sonics ended up winning just 23 games in 1967-68, although they were highly entertaining. Seattle scored 118.7 points per game, third-highest in the NBA. But they also allowed a league-worst average of 125.1. The 1970s were transformative for the Sonics, though. They hired the legendary Bill Russell as head coach and general manager before the 1973-74 season and made the playoffs for the first time a year later. Lenny Wilkens was hired early in the 1977-78 campaign when Russell was fired and took Seattle to the NBA Finals that season, losing to Washington—and then beating the Bullets for the NBA title in 1979.
The 1974 song by the Three Degrees, “When Will I See You Again”, seems apropos now. The Sonics were sold in 2006 to Clay Bennett, who pledged to keep the team in Seattle while he sought public funding for a new arena. It turned out that was never the plan, and that Bennett had intended to move the franchise to Oklahoma City all along. When the Washington Legislature rejected a proposal for a new $500 million arena in Renton in 2007, Bennett used that as his excuse to uproot the Sonics in 2008 and make them the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Here we are 18 years later, and the NBA is said to be on the verge of adding Seattle and Las Vegas as expansion franchises, perhaps by year’s end. Climate Pledge Arena is ready, and the Sonics would be reborn, since the old team’s name, logo, color schemes and banners have been preserved and will revert back to Seattle as soon as a new franchise is approved by the NBA. But after years of heartbreak, Sonics fans have learned not to count their chickens…
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
