Cavalier Is Right

Last week, Forbes declared Seattle the most miserable sports city in the country. Which is ridiculous, because in order to be miserable you first have to care.

Jeremy Eaton

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• National Basketball Association
• Judy Nicastro
• NBA Central
• Polls and Approval Ratings
• Politics

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Former City Council member Judy Nicastro is on some strange new vision quest to bring the NBA back to Seattle. Strange because the other day in an interview with KUOW, she referred to "major league" basketball's "160 games," which even your sports-confused mother knows is how many they play in baseball (minus two).

Nicastro's main selling point for her proposed initiative, which would either renovate KeyArena or build a new stadium in Bellevue, is a poll from SurveyUSA which shows that 72 percent of Seattleites favor a new NBA arena built without taxpayer money. That's roughly the same percentage of 4-year-olds who would answer "yes" to the question "Would you like to receive free ice cream for life?" In other words, it's a daydream.

Indeed, scratch the poll results any deeper and you come up with nothing but indifference.

Asked if they wanted a new team in Seattle, 41 percent said yes. A figure that becomes exponentially less impressive when you consider that a greater percentage—42—answered "I don't care."

Asked how likely they'd be to go to an NBA game in Seattle, 31 percent said "not at all." (That was the most popular response.)

Contrast this "meh" attitude with, say, Cleveland, which recently convinced a roomful of local luminaries, including Ohio's governor, to participate in a remix of "We Are the World" in an effort to get Cavaliers superstar LeBron James to stick around, and it's clear that some business magazines should stick to writing about business.

Joke's on you, Forbes. Seattleites don't give a damn!