The Five Stages of Grief | Acceptance/Hope: Will we get a new franchise?

The debates at Artisan Barber Salon are heated and salty at times. Inside the downtown Kansas City shop, they love their Royals and Chiefs, even though neither team has had much success lately.

Then there are the endless conversations about the Kansas Jayhawks and Kansas State Wildcats.

"This is a sports town," said Ted Kelly, one of the salon's barbers and a Kansas City resident since 1966. "Most people here are split between the Jayhawks and 'Cats, but everyone is a die-hard Chiefs and Royals fan."

Hardly anyone talks about the Kings anymore.

And why would they?

When Kansas City's only NBA team took off 23 years ago for Sacramento, it left behind thousands of brokenhearted sports fans that have since shifted their passion, loyalties and entertainment dollars.

As Kelly, 66, put it: "The best way to describe it is, we've moved on. That's what happens. You forget and move on."

The Kings' story is a cautionary tale for Seattle and Sonics fans.

In The Times' five-part series this week on grieving the potential loss of the NBA franchise, nearly 4,000 readers took part in an online poll that asked: What stage are you in? Anger, the top response, received 47 percent of the votes, while acceptance was second, with 33 percent.

Slade Gorton, the lead litigator in the city of Seattle's lawsuit against the Sonics, might have chosen the latter had he participated in the poll.

The inaction in Olympia the past several weeks has led the former U.S. Senator to believe that on Friday the NBA Board of Governors will rubber-stamp chairman Clay Bennett's bid to relocate to Oklahoma City next season, pending the outcome of the trial that starts June 16.

Gorton had a surefire alternative plan that he was going to present to NBA commissioner David Stern. Gorton had assembled four local investors, including Microsoft mogul Steve Ballmer, who were willing to purchase the Sonics. They offered to commit $150 million toward a $300 million KeyArena renovation and Mayor Greg Nickels anted up $75 million from the city.

Gorton also has what he believes is a winnable case against the Sonics' ownership group.

But what he didn't have was the support of Gov. Christine Gregoire and state legislators who declined to authorize King County to use a portion of an existing tax toward the renovation project.

"It's a huge amount of money to leave on the table because of course KeyArena is going to have to be improved in any event, whether it has the Sonics or not," Gorton said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "And without the Sonics and without people like this, the entire cost is going to fall on the backs of the taxpayers."

Now that his plan to save the Sonics has suffered a serious setback, Gorton has accepted the possibility that even if he were to win the lawsuit and force the team to play games at KeyArena until its lease expires in 2010, he might ultimately lose the Sonics.

"Our first goal is to always keep the Sonics and to keep [the team's] history," Gorton said. "If it ends up being a different team, well, I guess we can live with that. Certainly it would be a second choice and apparently we would keep the Sonics name and the Sonics history."

The city's case against the Sonics appears to have strengthened last week after e-mails revealed members of the ownership group discussed moving the team to Oklahoma City long before a contractually agreed deadline in which they would negotiate in good faith with Washington state leaders.

"In the final analysis, that kind of thing is background noise," said Marc Ganis, president of Sportscorp Ltd., a Chicago-based sports-industry consulting firm. "The issue is going to come down to whether Seattle wants to allow the Sonics to leave early in exchange for payment. People have threatened in many cases to go to court on one issue or another as it relates to sports team leases, but the number of deals that actually are decided in a courtroom, you can count on one hand. There's almost always a negotiated resolution. Almost always."

As state attorney in 1970, Gorton brought a breach of contract suit against Major League Baseball's American League when the Seattle Pilots left for Milwaukee.

"Actually, it was halfway through the trial when that settlement took place," Gorton said. "And that settlement resulted in the creation of the Mariners. The creation of the Mariners was the ultimate object of the lawsuit. We weren't trying to get the Pilots back."

When asked if history might repeat itself, Gorton replied: "No comment." He also declined to speculate what the city would do if Bennett increased a $26.5 million buyout offer that was rejected in February.

Comparing the Mariners' case with the Sonics situation, however, might be apples to oranges.

For starters, there are no guarantees Seattle will receive another NBA team if Bennett is successful in moving the Sonics.

Whenever Stern speaks of expansion, it's pertaining to a long-range plan of having franchises in Europe.

A few teams, including the New Orleans Hornets, Memphis Grizzlies, Sacramento Kings and Milwaukee Bucks, are candidates for relocation. But at least three cities — Las Vegas, Kansas City and San Jose — have expressed interest in luring the NBA.

And then there's the potential backlash from Stern, whose office is challenging a motion filed by the city of Seattle in New York federal court for potentially thousands of league documents, including financial records for every team in the league.

"The more Seattle takes actions that are detrimental to the NBA as a whole, the less likely it becomes of Seattle getting a franchise," Ganis said. "If you are helpful as a city, often you're rewarded, like Charlotte. Sometimes you just have to accept the inevitable."

Ganis argues that teams — even those that have been embedded in a community for 41 years — have left cities before and "sometimes they come back and sometimes they don't."

The Dodgers left Brooklyn. The Rams left Los Angeles. And the Kings left Kansas City.

Larry Drew, an assistant with the Atlanta Hawks, played five years with the Kings, including the final season in Kansas City in 1984-85.

"I'm from Kansas City, so I wasn't that excited about the team leaving," he said. "It was a weird feel to it all around. Knowing that these are your last days in one particular city."

The Kings drew fewer than 8,000 fans in 20 of their final 22 games at 17,000-seat Kemper Arena. The attendance for the final game was 11,371, which Drew described as "an amazing outpouring of celebration mixed with this sadness of knowing that this is the end."

"Once the move was made there was kind of a dead period," he said. "When it happened, you had those share of fans that did not want the team to leave. You had those loyal supporters there. And then once the team left, things were pretty quiet for a long time."

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