The ongoing drama surrounding the potential sale of the Sacramento Kings to a Seattle-based group helmed by hedge fund manager Chris Hansen and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer ramped up another notch on Sunday amid reports that, after a week and a half of discussions, the Kings ownership — led by the Maloof family, which has held a controlling interest in the team since 1999 — had reached an agreement to sell a 65 percent stake in the Kings to the Seattle group, which plans to move the Kings from Sacramento north, rebrand them the SuperSonics and revive a local NBA legacy cut short in 2008 when owner Clay Bennett moved the Sonics to Oklahoma City and turned them into the Thunder. The NBA confirmed those reports on Monday morning . News of the reported sale, understandably, drew plenty of attention from all sorts of people involved with the NBA ... including reigning MVP LeBron James, who took to Twitter with a pretty strong reaction to the steep financial figure cited in stories about the sale: So the Kings getting sold for 525M!! And the owners ain't making no money huh? What the hell we have a lookout for. Get the hell out of here — LeBron James (@KingJames) January 21, 2013 #lockout ! My bad. U know what I meant — LeBron James (@KingJames) January 21, 2013 And from what I hear the 525M isn't even the whole % of the team! Smh. One thing is I can't hate on their hustle though. Crazy — LeBron James (@KingJames) January 21, 2013 James has a point, of course — it does seem pretty remarkable that just over a year after the league told anyone who would listen that the NBA's business model was broken, that owners were finding it so impossible to operate teams at a profit that players needed to give back tens of millions of dollars per year in a scaled-back basketball-related income split and harder caps on what players could earn in salary lest the league's economy capsize, long-moribund franchises are selling for boatloads of cash. It's almost like the lockout wasn't about the league and its owners being poor, but rather the league and its owners being very, very eager to become richer. Imagine that.
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