Thought police have been increasingly active in this last 3 years and this smacks of David Stern’s heavy hand as he pays back Seattle and Washington for dissing him.

Question? Has ESPN made the same changes for the Charlotte Hornets?

is at GP’s HOF ceremony, is he going to inducted in an OKC Wind Jersey?

If you look at the the link from the 1993-94 season the Hornets are listed as Charlotte and clicking on the link takes you to the NOH ESPN site. Why can’t they do the same with the Sonics?

What are they going to do for that? Oklahoma City beat Oklahoma City?

it’s a LOT easier to simply modify the team name and demographic information is one table than it is to add a new team to the table, and trying to figure out in all the other tables in your database, which records need to be pointed to the new team ID and which need to remain pointed at the old team ID. Additionally, certain code that builds pages for certain displays of historical information may need to be modified to work correctly as well.

if the database schema was initially desinged to handle the various types of team moves, this would be simpler than if it were not. My guess is that it was not designed to be that easy. At that point, you have a choice: Change the team name in the master team table, so everything gets changed, OR redesign your schema, change the correct foreign keys, leaving others the same, and modify your code when/where needed. The second option could be quite time consuming.

Let us hope they went with option A as a temporary way of showing the move, with the plan in place to develop option B behind the scenes, and rolling it out when ready. This will result in the OKC stuff appearing unchanged going forward, but the historical Seattle stuff will get reverted
It especitally gets messy when you start talking about doing historical statistical lookups

There’s only been a precedent for it when a moving team keeps the same name. As in, Mikan being a “Laker Great”, Johnny Unitas being associated with the Indianapolis Colts, or the Zo/Grandmama days being a part of Hornets history rather than the Bobcats.

On the flip side, does anyone in their right mind associate Jim Brown with the Baltimore Ravens? Is Pedro Martinez part of the proud Washington Nationals history? The closest I could think of this making sense is hearing of the Sixers history as the Syracuse Nationals which was like 60 years ago.

If they’re going to leave the name, the history should stay, too, especially considering I’ll be shocked if they’re still in OKC in 30 years.

Just added my two cents with the ESPN ombudsman, too. Like I mentioned in my email to her, it’s bad enough that Sonics fans had to lose their team. There’s no need to take away their history, too.