ESPN's Around the Horn. OKC gets the go ahead from Tim Cowlishaw (fellow oklahoman) from the Dallas Morning News. Plus Kevin Blackistone from a Washington D.C. paper gives OKC some props.

ATH: Buy Or Sell - ESPN Video

Woody Paige is like Lee Corso in that he's rarely right about anything.

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Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. --Master Yoda
Facts can change opinions, opinions cannot change facts.

"Bears or the Thunder - potential names for Oklahoma City."

Wonder where they got that from?

Bears?





(sorry, meant to edit, not add a reply)

Barons he said...

Oh...of course.

are we really the smallest market in the NBA?

If you go by MSA and not city proper - yes.

sheesh! I almost had a heart attack over Bears! God NO!

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" You've Been Thunder Struck ! "

I saw this too. He said Barons. However, I wouldn't be opposed to Bears. I would much prefer the OKC Bears over the OKC Cowboys, Hicks, Outlaws, Rustlers, Wranglers.

What happened to Doghumpers?

No. New Orleans is the smallest MSA that hosts an NBA team.

They are talking about media markets not MSA totally different animal. Our market size is ranked so low because they refuse to add Tulsa unlike Salt Lake City who gets almost all of the population in Utah added to their market.

What OKC fans to realize is that OKC is to Seattle what Baltimore was to Cleveland years ago. When the Browns were purchased and relocated to Baltimore, people HATED Baltimore for what they did. However, Baltimore had the benefit of being a large city already.

In reality it comes down to this...OKC has to come out and support it and make it work. If they don't...Bennett will sell and the team is gone.

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AnvilCrawlers.com - Oklahoma weather resources

If they went by MSA instead of media market size it would be (according to wikipedia):

salt lake city 1.018mil
NOLA 1.030mil
OKC 1.192mil
Memphis 1.260mil

I don't think it would be to crazy to think that OKC metro could be about 1.4 mil or close in 10 years or so which would put us farther from the bottom. The exclusion of Tulsa from our market deducts about 1 million people for no apparent reason. I think 2.4 million people should be able to support one professional franchise. The stats that are making OKC look so bad are all out of whack giving the wrong impression.

Besides all that who cares if the national media is dogging OKC right now. We got the franchise now all we have to do is support it and there is nothing they can do to take it away. In a year or so nobody will be talking trash about it.

OKC did fine supporting the Hornets.

All of this babble about OKC being not able to do this or that will get squashed when it is announced that OKC sold 15,000 season tix for x years straight. And that many of the tix holders are from Tulsa, Wichita, Lawton, Amarillo, and Arkansas; while over 80% are from OKC.

All of these ESPN or who bash OKC's 'market' will have to REVISE those statements. We all know our region supports OKC teams. Just because OKC now has a major league tenant shouldn't mean that the OKC region would do any less than what the region currently does for the other teams.

In fact, on my recent visit to OKC - I had to go to Wichita for a few days and I asked people what they thought of OKC getting the NBA. EVERYONE I talked to (like 5 people) said they definitely would buy season tix and go down to the city - and that they already do go down quite a bit.

Really, OKC is much like Denver - in that it is the biggest city in the region and is a pretty huge entertainment draw for what otherwise is a pretty dry area. Sure there's Dallas, but you can not deny that the Red River is a great demarkation point for OKC to claim all points North to Canada if it wanted to.

This is something that Im sure Clay Bennett educated the NBA and Stern about, and is something that ESPN and all of the national media will be REMINDED of when the new OKC team AGAIN sets records for support.

I can't believe it. First they said lack of corporate sponsorship - yet the Hornets had one of the best in the league when in OKC. Then they said lack of Season Tix holders - yet once again, top 10 in the league (for a temporary team that sucked).

Then they said, small media market. Well, that didn't really get realized because the Hornets was temporary - but Im sure OKC will fulfill this gap, I mean don't the media support OU very well and isn't OU a Top 5 annual football school? Doesn't OU do well competing with LA/USC, Louisiana/LSU, Austin/UT, Columbus/OSU, Florida/UF, FSU, MIA, Michigan, and Atlanta/UGA??

doesn't OU consistantly draw as much money as those markets who are much larger? Why wouldn't OKC do well with a more coveted major league team having OKLAHOMA CITY on the front of its jerseys???

Oh, and OKC is NOT the smallest market (it's one of them tho).

Salt Lake is the smallest by metro pop, followed by New Orleans. OKC will soon surpass Memphis I suspect in 2010; so that OKC will be the 4th smallest when it really counts.

New Orleans is the smallest media market, right now Memphis and OKC are virtually tied; but I suspect OKC will surpass Memphis this year.

Salt Lake City gets it's whole state and S. Idaho for it's media market (a pop of 2M households) however surely OKC's media will be the whole state of OK and likely S. Kansas, W. AR (roughly 4M households).

All Im saying is, OKC can (underscore CAN) already hold its own with other 2nd tier NBA cities; things will ONLY get better as time goes on and having a PERMANENT MAJOR LEAGUE TEAM matures in the minds of OKC residents and the region.

The national media might not REMEMBER but they surely will be reminded of this - and will have to EAT their sudden criticism of Oklahoma City. It wasn't long ago that everyone was saying that OKC should get an expansion team or that the Hornets should have never left OKC. Why is it that JUST because the Sonics franchise left Seattle - that all of sudden OKC can't cut it anymore???

Hypocritical!

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Oklahoma City, RENAISSANCE CITY!

Although it wouldn't make my top five list of names, I could live with Bears if it made the list. I spent many a youthful year in southeast Oklahoma, and yeah, we gots bears, so there's at least some connection. I don't dislike that opne any more or less than I dislike Barons.
8^)

The national media will remember for a while. And, were the _________s to get into the playoffs, there would be discussion about the sad fact that they were originally in Seattle, since the media has to talk about something. A lot of that would be ameliorated were Seattle to get another team and the Sonics were playing there again. I still think the Colts get a lot more grief than the Ravens, because they kept the name and the history, which is precisely why I thought the name should be left in Seattle. I don't want any Sonics' banners either. That would actually bring up talk every time a game in OKC is television nationally, and we don't want that. I'm hoping Bennett said that he wants copies of the banners to use as a negotiating point with Schultz.

I do think, though, that if we sell out season tickets and again become the place all the other teams love/hate to play, that a lot of the negative national media attention will go away quickly.

While I agree with you 100% you have to be careful when comparing things to OU. First off American Football is in a whole other world than basketball. Even though college football is not the NFL, OU draws attention just like NFL teams. So I think it will be hard to compare the two. However I agree that OKC can and WILL support the team just fine. Tulsa and Wichita may not get included in the media market, but I guarantee you people from both cities will show up.

As far as corporate sponsorships are concerned, I think Devon, Chesepeke, OneOK, Williams and others will defiantly make their presence know.

This is all just a blip on the radar, with time the fact that the team was originally from Seattle will slowly diminish.

Those of us that were around when the Browns, Colts, 'A', and the Rams know that it will become a footnote in history. There are still those around that speak about those most, and hold a gruge, but they are few and far between.

Start winning games and making play-offs and very few people with even talk about it at all.

i kinda wonder how house bill 1084 will affect our 2010 census. i heard a lot of latinos moved out of state due to that, and they seem to be the fastest growing group of people.

I doubt it. Most of the hispanics that would leave, don't fill out census information.

Is it optional to refuse?

In 2000, I kind of blew off the deal and some real nice person from the government showed up at my apartment and "helped" me fill it out.