NBA

Report: The Sacramento Kings Are Moving To Seattle

Seattle basketball fans, rejoice: starting next season, you will (reportedly!) have a new NBA team to fill that gaping hole in your heart.

The Maloof family, who have long threatened to move the Kings out of Sacramento, are very close to selling the team to a Seattle-based group of investors, reports Yahoo’s Adrian Wojnarowski. That group, led by hedge-fund manager Chris Hansen and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, will buy the Kings for a cool $500 million before promptly moving it to Seattle’s Key Arena for the beginning of the 2013-14 season. A move to a new Seattle arena — a move that the NBA is reportedly supportive of — is being forecasted for the 2015-16 season.

Nothing is yet signed, and the Maloofs’ penchant for fourth quarter waffling still has some “uneasy” about the deal. (After all, no one would want to get too Maloof’d before everything’s hammered out all official-like.)

Nevertheless, this is the best bit of news zombified Sonics fans have heard in quite some time.

To Woj’s Twitter timeline we go.

The Seattle group’s plans, with support of the NBA, is to play two seasons in Key Arena before moving into a new Seattle arena, sources say.

— Adrian Wojnarowski (@WojYahooNBA) January 9, 2013

The Maloofs are expected to keep an extremely small percentage of team, but will have no real input or say in franchise, sources say.

— Adrian Wojnarowski (@WojYahooNBA) January 9, 2013

As always with these situations, one fan base’s gain is another one’s loss: Sacramento fans are great and they’ve been fighting to keep their team for a while, so they really don’t deserve what’s (reportedly!) about to happen to them. On the other hand, the “saddest children’s book ever now has a happy new chapter.

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