Seattle venture capital investor, Chris Hansen, who headed the group looking to purchase the Kings and move them to Seattle, was caught donating $100K to the Anti-Kings-Arena group, STOP, which had previously been linked to former Kings owners the Maloofs. Hansen was contrite after the connection surfaced, offering an apology to the people of Sacramento for his underhanded effort to ruin their new arena deal and help facilitate a move to his hometown.
But Scott Howard-Cooper of NBA.com opines that Hansen's back-handed donation hurts Seattle more than it might have hurt Sacramento. Howard-Cooper argues that Hansen owes an apology to the people of Seattle more so than the one he gave Sacramento on Friday.
Seattle still remains a city without a basketball team after Clay Bennett moved the Seattle Supersonics to Oklahoma City in the summer of 2008 ostensibly after the city voted against publicly funding a new stadium. Hansen's actions have drawn the ire of the NBA, and Howard-Cooper says it has created another obstacle in the path of professional basketball's return to rainy Seattle.
Howard-Cooper adds, via Twitter, that Hansen's public scolding is a nice cherry on top for Sacramento since the league approved the sale of the team to a Sacramento-group led by Vivek Ranadive. He wonders why Hansen donated the money when he had to be aware it would eventually be made public (Twitter). But he also cautions, with a tweet, that this sort of corporate sabotage happens all the time when this much money is at stake; it just usually goes unreported.