Hijack City Blunder Will Never Make The Playoffs

There has been a lot of talk recently about the fact that the Hijack City Blunder are going to be the new up-and-coming team in the West and will challenge for a playoff spot in the 2009-2010 season.

Are you kidding me? The Hijack City Blunder will be challenging for a playoff spot next season? A team that currently has 22 wins on the year? A team that had a better record when their best player wasn’t playing for them?

To make the playoffs in the Western Conference you need to win road games, and the Blunder are currently 25 games below .500 on the road with two more left to play in the season.

There’s one game in Portland, against the Blazers, and one against the Clippers in LA. The Clippers absolutely own the Blunder this year too.

It’s more than likely that the Thunder are going to finish with only 22 wins (just two better than they did in Seattle the previous year on a team that was completely gutted) and be straddled with the fifth or sixth pick in the draft.

The draft is not deep people, and by the fifth or sixth pick a player that could actually make a difference will be off the board.

Blake Griffin, Ricky Rubio, Hasheem Thabeet, and James Harden will all be off the board.

What does that leave the Blunder with? Ty Lawson, Greivis Vasquez, or Gerald Henderson?

Adding one of those three guys may get you to 25 wins, but they’re all going to be bench players on the Blunder.

The Blunder need a power forward or a center.

A lot of people think Thabeet is going to be a game changer in the pros.

He won’t be for a few years; he’s going to be raw and unpolished just like Greg Oden.

His rookie season will be spent mostly on the bench. Not because of a lack of playing time, but because he can’t stay out of foul trouble. It’s going to take a year or more for him to catch up to NBA speed. It took him nearly three years to catch up with the college game.

Why should we expect anything less than that when he gets to the NBA?

By the time Thabeet becomes a beast in the NBA, Durant, Green, and Westbrook will all be gone and he’ll be in a contract year. You think the Blunder can afford to pay him?

Nope.

See, Hijack City is the third smallest market in the NBA. The Hornets aren’t making any money and they’re a Western Conference contender. The Memphis Grizzlies moved from a great metropolitan city in the Pacific Northwest to a podunk down in the middle of nowhere.

The Grizzlies are the only game in town and yet they’re a year or two from being in Kansas City.

For the Blunder to have made money this year, and this was stated by owner Aubrey McClendon right before the move to Hijack City, they needed to sell out all 41 home games. They sold out 18 and attendances declined throughout the season.

How are season ticket sales going to be next year?

If interest on their forums or in their newspaper, The Daily Oklahoman, are any indication, it’s not going to be very pretty next year.

Expect season ticket sales to plummet, not even getting close to the 15,000 they sold this year. Expect around 10,000 or less.

I can hear the Okies now, crying: “But the Memphis Tigers basketball team is more popular than the NBA team.”

You know what? You’re right, you're 100% right.

You know what else? The Oklahoma Sooners football and basketball teams are a lot more popular in the Hijack City area than the Blunder are.

The Blunder are destined to play second fiddle all year long to any of the OU teams. The Sooners basketball team with Blake Griffin drew better television rankings than the Thunder did.

A friend who passed through the area not too long ago even said he saw more Blake Griffin OU jerseys than he did Kevin Durant Blunder jerseys.

The count on that was 9-0.

So we can expect ticket sales to be down and merchandise and television revenues to be next to nothing.

That’s not a good thing, especially a year away from Durant and Green being in contract years.

2009-2010 is sadly going to look like 2008-2009 in Hijack City. The Blunder most likely pencil in 25-30 wins and finish around last in their division again.

During the summer of 2011, the Los Angeles Lakers or New York Knicks will throw out an offer that the Blunder can’t match, Kevin Durant will be in one of those cities, and he will become an All-Star for the very first time.

Jeff Green will go to a contender and make a huge difference. Possibly even Cleveland and help LeBron to a "threepeat."

The Blunder will continue to be lottery bound and lose money, and during the 2014 season, Bennett will be broke and demand a lot of things from the city that they can’t afford. He’ll sell the team and the 2014-2015 season will be played in Kansas City under new owners.

It will be another 20 years before Hijack City sees another pro team, if it ever does.

From the shots Hijack City has taken in the media all year, it won’t be a bad thing for the 29 other teams. I’m sure they’d rather go to Kansas City than Hijack City any day of the week.

And “they” call Oklahoma God’s country.

This is another case of who “they” really are. Oklahoma has miles of dust and a few rolling hills. Its towns are constantly ravaged by tornadoes every year, killing dozens.

Doesn’t sound like God’s country to me. Sounds more like a place for God to take out his anger.