Danny Westneat thinks we can outfox the Oklahomans who bought, and now overtly want to take away, the Sonics. Westneat thinks we can freeze ’em out with a megadose of “Seattle polite” and “Seattle process.”

I’m not so sure.

It’s true that the Okie cowboy-capitalists who bought the team are firebrands, and that the best way to fight fire is with water.

But frozen water, perhaps not.

As you know, I was never a sports-hating hippie. I believe in bigtime sports as community institutions.

I want to keep the Sonics and Storm (no, not just the Storm).

Yet, the NBA’s business model is broken. Fewer TV viewers (the inevitable result of new home-leisure technologies) mean less money to pay overpriced diva superstars. Limited arena capacities (even in bigger arenas than ours) means ticket revenues have inherent caps, no matter how high teams raise prices. Team ownership has become a speculative hobby–a zillionaire buys a team, loses money on it, then sells it at a profit to some other zillionaire.

That’s who Clay Bennett and Co. are. They know they’re unlikely to turn an operating profit on the team, wherever it is. They want pro basketball in their town as means of boosting their town’s nightlife and tourism industries, in a place traditionally lacking in both. They’d only keep the teams here if we paid them such ridiculous amounts of corporate welfare that they just couldn’t say no.

Like ex-Mariners owner George Argyros and ex-Seahawks owner Ken Behring, Bennett and his cohorts are parasitical figures who need to be expunged from the local and national sports scenes.

How?

If we all boycott the teams, Bennett will just claim we don’t deserve ’em.

If our socio-economic upper crust shuns the owners, they won’t mind; they never intended to make any friends here.

Nope. We gotta do to Bennett’s crowd what we did to Argyros and Behring–push back with legal threats and procedural stalls, until a new local ownership group can be formed.