The ’90s Made the Sonics Iconic—and Planted the Seeds for Heartbreak

I’ve spent much of the last year obsessing over a question: How did Seattle—once home to Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp, to the Seattle SuperSonics, one of the iconic franchises that defined the NBA of my youth—end up as a basketball orphan? How did one of America’s most vibrant basketball markets become a market without an actual team?

I knew some version of an answer. The same one known by so many who follow the NBA. Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz sold the team away to a man from Oklahoma, Clay Bennett. Bennett skipped town. The end.

But I wanted to know more. More about what happened in Seattle, and in Oklahoma, and in other cities from New York to New Orleans that all led to one of the great heists in the history of pro sports.

So I went searching for answers. And the deeper into the search I went, the messier and more complicated, and sometimes more confusing, the whole thing got. And as I allowed myself to fall deeper into this obsession, I found myself fixated on so many people beyond just Schultz and Bennett. So many things had to go wrong—or right, if you’re from Oklahoma—for this to happen. So many people had a stake in this struggle.

So I talked to them. There are the players, from Lenny Wilkens to Gary Payton, who now find themselves retired, legends of a franchise that no longer exists. There were the local activists who fought to keep the team in town, and the ones who almost seemed to be pushing them out the door. And I obsessed over the people behind the scenes in Seattle and Oklahoma. People who made deals on late-night conference calls and on private jets, people whose own ambitions were bound up with the fate of the franchise.

All of it brought me here. To a story about a heist. And about a loss.

Below is an excerpt from the first episode of Sonic Boom, the new documentary podcast series from The Ringer available exclusively on Luminary. Listen here and check back each Thursday through November 21 for new episodes.

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The 1990s are the decade when the Seattle SuperSonics became iconic. It was also the decade when the team tried to renovate its old arena. The decade when the wheels began turning that would ultimately send the franchise out of town.

Those ’90s Sonics never won a championship. But there was still something magnetic about them. Something almost countercultural. Especially if we’re talking about their two biggest stars.

“Of course you had this monster in a guy named Shawn Kemp,” says George Karl, who coached the Sonics from 1992 to ’98. “You had a 6′11″ guy. Two hundred and seventy pounds that played like a 6′6″ athlete. In the history of the NBA, there probably aren’t 20 better athletes than what Shawn Kemp was.”

Kemp dunked on everyone, everywhere, all the time. He bruised defenders’ bodies and destroyed their sense of pride.

Kemp was from Elkhart, Indiana, a small town near the Michigan border. But at this point, he felt like he belonged to Seattle. Brian Robinson, who operates the website Sonics Rising, remembers.

“I went to Western Washington University—Shawn Kemp was 22 years old at that time or something,” he says. “And you would just be at a party and all of a sudden he would roll through, or you’d be getting up for breakfast and see him walking down. Shawn was one of those. He followed Ken Griffey Jr. as one of those just-kind-of-everywhere guys that you would run into at the hamburger spot. You can’t miss him! No, he’s so big. He’s a great guy.”

And then there was the guy who was usually passing Kemp the ball: the point guard from Oakland, Gary Payton. I once talked to an NBA player who told me that in that era, every single rookie could remember the first time Gary Payton gave them shit. It was like a baptism. Payton says the best players got the worst of it.

“Everybody that came into the league as a rookie who was supposed to be the no. 1 and no. 2 picks and all of that stuff,” he said. “Yeah I was the no. 2 pick, but it took me a while to get to where I was at. I’mma whoop everybody that’s in here and let y’all understand that this player right here from Oakland, California, was underrated, you know what I’m saying? And then all of a sudden, now you’re going to see your talent. So let’s see what kind of talent you got. So I made it a point that every rookie that came in I had to go at ’em.”

Payton and Kemp played the game a little outside of NBA norms.

“Well we was playground basketball players, and we were like that. We didn’t never have a leash on us where we were clamped,” he says.

For his part, George Karl loved Gary. He loved Shawn. They clashed at times, sure, but he still thinks of them fondly.

“The one thing I always loved about Gary is 99 percent of the time, Gary Payton played,” Karl says. “You know he might yell and he might cuss at me, and you know you might break the code of basketball respect, but he usually was very easy to stimulate into playing the game the right way and playing hard. And our players respected that. And Shawn was the same way.”

Payton didn’t like to practice. Kemp didn’t show up on time. Both partied all over Seattle. But that was part of what made them so appealing. That tension: detached coolness away from the court, and burn-the-world-down intensity the moment the lights came on.

Kemp and Payton were complemented by Detlef Schrempf, a smooth scorer and rangy defender. And by Nate McMillan. The captain. The glue. They were surrounded by shooters and defenders. A perfectly constructed team. No wasted parts.

It’s funny, though. For a team that felt so iconic at the time, they were—in many ways—marked by failure.

In 1993-94, they went 63-19. They were the best team in the Western Conference. They played Denver, the eighth seed, in the first round of the playoffs. After going up 2-0 in a best of five series, things unraveled.

They lost Game 3 in Denver. And then Game 4, also in Denver. They returned to Seattle for Game 5, at the Seattle Center Coliseum. And even back home, they looked terrible.

They lost, 98-94. For the first time ever, a no. 1 seed lost in the first round. There’s this unforgettable image of Nuggets center Dikembe Mutombo clutching the ball on the floor, screaming in celebration.

“I’m trying to buy that clip so I can burn it,” Karl says. “That one might be the worst day of my life. I mean I sat in the hot tub drinking beer till about two o’clock in the morning, and it was an afternoon game.”

That loss to Denver was the last game ever played at the old Seattle Center Coliseum. They were set to renovate it later that year. And honestly, those renovations were long overdue.

The Coliseum had been built in 1962, and by the ’90s, it still had a great atmosphere—passionate fans, a lot of noise—but it was a dump.

“There were not one, but I would say closer to 10 games, that we had problems with leakage in the roof or some type of condensation going on the court,” Karl says. “You know when your players look like they’re playing in ice skates there’s something going on.”

So the team and the city decide, “Let’s fix this thing. Let’s take this old, decrepit husk of an arena, and let’s turn it into something shiny and new.”

Going into the 1995-96 season, the newly renovated building opens. They call it Key Arena.

Lenny Wilkens, a Hall of Fame coach and player for the Sonics, told me that all the arena did was place a Band-Aid on an old wound. They added some seats. But they were narrow, small. He says the building felt like it was falling down.

Wally Walker, the former GM, told me it was a nice atmosphere, but that it felt like a college arena.

Steve Kelley, then a columnist from the Seattle Times, says Key Arena was obsolete the day it was reopened.

“The stark contrast was when they played the Bulls, who were just getting into the United Center,” he says. “You could fit Key Arena inside of United Center. Corridors were cramped, the seating at Key Arena was horrible—you couldn’t even fit the cups in the cup holders. It was a really poorly thought-out plan. It was done on the cheap.”

The decisions to fix this arena, way back in the ’90s, are the decisions that lead to what we’re exploring today: why the Sonics left just over a decade later. No one knew it then, but these are the moments that open the door for the Sonics to eventually leave town.