City expert gets a rough welcome in Sonics trial

If you can't hire him, batter him on the witness stand.

Seattle SuperSonics lawyer Paul Taylor ripped into an expert for the city Tuesday during the second day of a federal trial to determine whether the team must honor the final two years of its lease at KeyArena.

The expert - Harvard-trained sports economist Andrew Zimbalist, a professor at Smith College in Massachusetts - was called to testify about the "intangible benefits," such as civic pride, the team brings to the region. It's an important part of Seattle's case: If the city can show such benefits exist and can't be quantified, it can better argue that the court cannot calculate an amount of money that would compensate for the team's loss, and that therefore the judge should keep the team in Seattle.

During cross-examination, Taylor sought to harshly undermine Zimbalist's credibility, suggesting he was a hired gun and a quack who tried to "assign economic value to feeling good with your buddies."

Once Taylor finished, Seattle lawyer Greg Narver resumed questioning Zimbalist - and noted that the Sonics' ownership group, Professional Basketball Club LLC, also tried to hire him to be its trial expert.

The questioning of Zimbalist was rushed on both sides: He had a flight to catch, and the Sonics' lawyers agreed to halt their cross-examination of team owner Clay Bennett to allow the city to put Zimbalist on the stand.

"Professor Zimbalist is probably the foremost expert on sports economics in the country," Seattle lawyer Paul Lawrence said later. "That's why the PBC tried to hire him."

Taylor accused Zimbalist of lifting parts of his Sonics' analysis from a study of baseball's Los Angeles Angels he did in 2005. Zimbalist conceded many parts were nearly verbatim, but said both reports were based on his notes and lectures, and Lawrence said many of the similar passages concerned definitions of economic terms or theory that didn't need to be rewritten.

In that earlier report, Zimbalist concluded that - based on a "Jaguars per household" benchmark - the economic impact of the Angels on quality of life in the Los Angeles area could be estimated at $7.75 million.

But in his analysis of the "intangible benefits" the Sonics provide to Seattle, Zimbalist concluded, "There is no precise way to quantify these values."

Taylor questioned how Zimbalist could come up with a number in L.A., but not in Seattle and asked point-blank if Seattle officials or lawyers had instructed him not to come up with a number because it would hurt their case.

"No," Zimbalist responded.

He said that the "Jaguar" benchmark he used in L.A. was part of a "quality-of-life" analysis - just a small part of a broader and far more complex "intangible benefit" analysis.