Stern is staying on sideline concerning Sonics

While two cities wrestle with NBA arena issues that might result in their teams leaving town, commissioner David Stern is taking drastically different approaches in how he's handling the situations in Seattle and Sacramento, Calif.

The league is assisting the Kings' effort to fund a new publicly/privately financed building, but when it comes to Seattle, Stern said the adversarial relationship between the Oklahoma City-based ownership group and local officials has forced him to remain on the sideline.

"If there were a role for me, the answer is absolutely, yes," he said from New York during his annual preseason conference call Thursday. "But as we watch for an opening for an intelligent path, I mean, Sacramento, the team is a fixture. Everyone has expressed that they want them to stay. The statements of support on an ongoing basis from the city, the county, the governor have been very good. It's a completely different situation.

"I just don't want to offend people by just coming parachuting in saying, 'OK, this is the way it should be.' I tried that, and my track record is not very good in Seattle or in Olympia. I don't know that I really add anything to the situation."

A year ago, Stern testified before the state legislature on behalf of the previous, Howard Schultz-led ownership group and found little support in the state capital for plans to renovate KeyArena.

"The speaker [of the house Frank Chopp] out there said that it would get out of committee over his strenuous objections, shall we say," Stern said. "So there was no heart whatsoever for assisting the Sonics team."

The commissioner also cited the passage of Initiative 91, which prohibits Seattle from supporting teams with city tax dollars unless such investments yield a profit on par with a 30-year U.S. Treasury bond, and described the measure as "unique in the annals of American arena building."

After the Clay Bennett-led group purchased the Sonics last year, Stern said: "We were in consultation with the team that hired a whole new set of lobbyists and PR consultants and arena consultants. [We] did everything right."

Stern is standing firmly with the Sonics, who argued before U.S. District Judge Ricardo S. Martinez last week on whether Martinez or a panel of arbitrators should settle the dispute, in which the Sonics seek to buy out the final two years of their KeyArena lease.

If the Sonics win their dispute, Bennett said he'll move the team and the Storm next year to Oklahoma City. And if Bennett loses, he still plans to move both teams once the lease expires in 2010 unless there's a plan in place to build a new arena.

"We'd love to have found the path that would see them staying," Stern said. "But right now it just seems that either they'll be there for the duration of their lease or they won't depending on the outcome of these litigations or some divine inspiration that someone may have with respect to a new arena and a suitable funding for it.

"That's just the way I think the owners look at it, and I think that's the way I feel about it."

Percy Allen: 206-464-2278 or pallen@seattletimes.com