The Cash is as high as an elephant's eye

Its been announced that the Seattle Sonics will be leaving their perpetually rainy, latte loving home city of Seattle and moving to Oooooooooooooklahoma... City. This is quite a change in enviroment in almost every way: climate, industry, geography, politics. This move has long been predicted, but it still raises some questions. I haven't followed the politics of the decision very closely, so I don't know exactly who is responsible for this move. I'm guessing its the usual culprit, the owner, who decided he couldn't squeeze enough blood out of Seattle. But I have to wonder how bad things are when picking up the pieces and moving to Oklahoma City is considered a good business move. But then again, this is a franchise that choose to change its name from the Supersonics to the plain old Sonics, so maybe they don't have the right businesspeople calling the shots.

Seattle and OKC have basically the same metro population, but in terms of state population, which makes up a big part of the TV watching and jersey buying fan base, Washington doubles up on Oklahoma. The population of Washington also makes more money on average than the people in Oklahoma. Even if they could pull in fans from Kansas, Arkansas and northern Texas, I doubt it makes up for the difference. But maybe that doesn't quite matter, since the people in OK have only the OU Sooners and OSU Cowboys currently, and no professional teams of any sort, while the people of Seattle still have an NFL, MLB, and WNBA franchise. Plus its my understanding that the people of OK are so eager to have a pro franchise of their own that they will be shelling out big bucks for facilities, tickets and merchandise. Its a classic case of big fish, small pond.

The Sonics say they'll no longer be the Sonics, and will be changing both their name and team colors. So what should the new name be? The old OU mascot was the "roughriders", which I think is a great name but maybe more suited for a football team than a basketball team. Having been (briefly) through Oklahoma, I have a few other suggestions: the oil derricks, the gushers, the tornadoes, the corn bushels, and the Garth Brookses. Boomers and Sooners are probably out as names in light of the OU connection, but if they really wanted to be historically accurate and generate some buzz they could pick the Indians, in honor of all the tribes which we so generously relocated to Oklahoma. Of course none of these names will be chosen. Instead we'll get some focused grouped name picked by a marketing committee. They'll probably try to make it sound hip and give the team some jazzy new unis that are sure to be hideous.

Maybe there's a little hope. Alliteration is big nowadays in selecting team names (see Wizards, Washington or Titans, Tennessee etc). Alliteration is catchy and hip, which marketing types love. So here's my final suggestion: The Oklahoma Orgasm. Its perfect: people love orgasms, plus you can shorten it easily to Orgy to use as a nickname. Think of all the fun the NBA beat writers could have: "Lakers top Orgy" "Orgy too hot for Suns to handle" or "Orgasm gets best of Knickerbockers". As an added bonus, all those generic slogans which pro teams come up with like "Catch the Fever" or "Get Some" would take on a whole new meaning.