Ray Allen still remembers playing for the Seattle Sonics. And he recalls them preparing to exit Seattle even when he was still there. And now that they’re located in Oklahoma and called by a different name, he sees no connection between what was and what is.
Like Allen, a lot of pissed off Seattle citizens don’t associate with the OKC franchise, either.
As reported in the Boston Globe:
“‘You could tell that they were doing a lot of budget-cutting,’ Allen said. ‘They were taking a lot of short cuts. The way the team, under the Howard Schultz ownership, the way they ran the team, it was sub-par to what most NBA teams had been running.'”
…
Allen says he hasn’t been back to Seattle much since. There are a handful of Sonics holdovers still employed by the Thunder. But he doesn’t associate himself with that franchise.
‘If the name were the same or the colors were the same you would notice it,’ Allen said. ‘But for the most part you could see they’ve done a good job trying to cut all the ties from the Seattle team.’
