NBA returning briefly to Seattle; questions of future loom

SEATTLE (AP) — An NBA preseason game may not seem like a benchmark moment, even in a basketball-hungry city like Seattle, but Jamal Crawford believes there's value even in an exhibition.

“It reignites a whole new generation of kids who need to see this,” said Crawford, a Seattle native who has been a basketball ambassador for the city through a 20-year NBA career and now with a pro-am that brings in NBA players every summer. “They need to be able to dream and know that it’s real.”

The NBA makes its latest brief return to the Emerald City on Monday night when the Los Angeles Clippers face the Portland Trail Blazers. The matchup will be the first NBA contest here since 2018, when the Golden State Warriors and Sacramento Kings played a preseason game that was the last sporting event inside KeyArena before it was gutted and rebuilt into the gleaming Climate Pledge Arena.

A sell-out crowd turned out for that NBA game, the first one in Seattle since the beloved SuperSonics left for Oklahoma City in 2008 after 41 years in the Pacific Northwest.

“The Sonics haven’t been a team since I’ve been in the NBA. So just to go play in Seattle is cool,” Blazers star Damian Lillard said. “We played in Vancouver a few years back. I think like two or three years ago, we had a preseason game at the (Memorial) Coliseum. So every time we get to do something like that, I always enjoy it because I wondered what was it like when it was a real thing, when the games were played in these different arenas. So I am excited to play in Seattle.”

Someday, possibly soon, the expectations are that Seattle will reclaim its place as an NBA town.

Speculation is nonstop about when the NBA will choose to expand. Thanks to the resolution of its arena