After flying to Springfield, MA., to attend the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame ceremonies in September for the induction of former Sonics center Jack Sikma, I was chatting up the driver of the airport shuttle.

"So what do you hear about the size the crowd expected here?" I said.

"Good," he said, "but nothing like it will be next year."

"Why?"

"Kobe. It'll be nuts."

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I owe David Stern a thank you.

It's a little late for that realization, since he died Wednesday. But emotional contradiction is often the case when it comes to complex characters. Such people can exhilarate and infuriate, sometimes in the same paragraph. It becomes difficult to know whether to salute or slug.

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SPRINGFIELD, Mass. -- For a town dead to the NBA, Seattle showed it could still light up the game.

The two most exuberant moments in the induction ceremonies for the class of 2019 at the Naismith Memorial National Basketball Hall of Fame were reserved for ex-Seattle SuperSonics star Jack Sikma.

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SPRINGFIELD, Mass. -- Growing up on a farm in Illinois, Jack Sikma daily awoke to the sounds of birds and the scent of flowers. Growing up in New York City, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar daily awoke to the sounds of birds coughing and the smell of trash.

From disparate worlds, the rivals spent 12 years in each other's grills, farm kid and Harlem kid meeting regularly in the low post in Seattle and Los Angeles. Friday night they meet again in more hospitable and salutary circumstances.

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On the one hand, no one should be surprised that Steve Ballmer upended the NBA last week. He already did it once in 2014, when he paid $2 billion to buy the Los Angeles Clippers, a then-unimaginable sum in pro basketball, even for an industry pickled with Foghorn Leghorn personalities steeped in cash as well as the art of bombast.

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Mariners fans alert: Sports-franchise enfeeblement is not a permanent condition.

Probably you knew that. But when the local nine leads the solar system in errors, strikeouts and double-digit losses, sometimes it's important to hear the reminder over the Benny Hill-theme music playing on an endless loop in your minds.

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The NBA had itself some drama Monday night. The two-time defending champs, down 3-1, celebrate the return after 32 days of their star big man, who plays 14 brilliant minutes, only to go down with a more serious injury. Yet Golden State wins. By one. On the road.

The Toronto Raptors, feeling the weight of everyone from Hudson's Bay to Whitehorse on their backs, slavering for a first championship, can't shoot a lick, yet come from 14 down to six up inside the final four minutes. Then they ease ever so slightly, and lose. By one. At home.

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There was a time in Seattle when the SuperSonics were the biggest deal. Now they are no deal.

So when the time came Saturday for the 40th anniversary of Seattle's first modern major sports championship, melancholy nibbled at the edges.

To be sure, many cheers and laughs pickled the one public celebration, when coach Lenny Wilkens and six players made it to a pre-game ceremony at T-Mobile Park to have a go at the ceremonial first pitch.

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Knowing how the dwindling knot of Mariners fans are repulsed annually by the bellicose Canadians who commandeer T-ball Park for the annual series with the Blue Jays, this notion may be hard to take. But since the NBA Finals features the Toronto Raptors for the first time in their existence, they are automatic darlings of the North American pro sports spring.

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Surprisingly, the great University of Connecticut basketball coach Geno Auriemma was at the Seattle Storm practice Tuesday afternoon where he met up with two of his former great UConn players: Guard Sue Bird and forward Breanna Stewart.

Not that Stewart was playing.

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BY CHRIS TOMASSON

MINNEAPOLIS -- Jack Sikma was talking Saturday about the top centers he faced in his NBA career. Then he mentioned Shaquille O’Neal.

“I missed him by a couple of years,’’ Sikma, who retired in 1991, said of O’Neal, who entered the league in 1992.

Sikma paused.

“Put it this way: He missed me,’’ Sikma said, smiling.

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BY CHRIS TOMASSON

MINNEAPOLIS -- Paul Westphal has a trivia question he loves to ask.

“Did you know that I was traded twice for hall of famers?’’ he said.

In 1975, Westphal was dealt from the Boston Celtics to the Phoenix Suns for Charlie Scott. In 1980, he went from the Suns to the Seattle SuperSonics for Dennis Johnson.

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Unlike the highly visible, decade-long media hype and angst around Mariners star Edgar Martinez, Seattle's most recent pro athlete to receive his sport's highest honor, Jack Sikma's moment found him alone in his Eastside home. He was watching the livestream of a game in Germany's Bundesliga Basketball League featuring his son, Luke, who a year ago was named the BBL's most valuable player.

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Jack Sikma, who in 1979 helped lead the Seattle SuperSonics to their only NBA championship, has been selected for induction to the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame in Springfield, MA., a source told Sportspress Northwest. The official announcement will be made at 9 a.m. Saturday PT (ESPN2) in Minneapolis, site of the Final  Four.

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On the July day in 2006 that principal owner Howard Schultz announced he was selling the Sonics to out-of-town buyers, he did something petty that turned out to have significant symbolism.

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For a sports marketplace that lost an MLB team in 1970, an NBA team in 2008, and lost temporarily its NFL team for a couple of weeks in 1996, the theoretical threat of relocation of the Seahawks in the wake of the death of owner Paul Allen provokes an understandable twitch. Especially given the random ruthlessness that appears to drive the business of American pro sports.

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Upon the same KeyArena basketball floor at the same time Friday night stood Spencer Haywood and Kevin Durant.

You have to be of a certain vintage to appreciate the hoops majesty of the moment. As Haywood, in suit and tie, stood along the sidelines watching Durant warm up, I realized I was looking at the two greatest Sonics in the NBA's half-century in Seattle.

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After a serious scare from Phoenix in the semifinals, the Seattle Storm made the shortest possible work of the Washington Mystics -- a three-game sweep -- and are now three-time WNBA champs. The 98-82 triumph Wednesday on the campus of George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, made it trophy No. 3 for Seattle, the first since 2010.

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Working out at the Jewish Community Center on Mercer Island in the summer of 1978, Wally Walker recalled getting acquainted with the Sonics' new power forward.  At 6-8 and 280 pounds, Lonnie Shelton, 23, already established his reputation in two years with the New York Knicks as a gent sufficient to make mean men quiver and fast men falter.

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The award this week of the NBA's Most Valuable Player trophy to Houston's James Harden produced some locally depressing poignancy, at least if you're in the sepia-toned crowd who remembers when Seattle had an NBA franchise.

Harden was the third member of the 2009-12 Prairie Pirates (whom some continue to call the Oklahoma Thunder) to have won an MVP award.

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