Can't buy press this good

About time we finally get some good press from sports commentators. Gotta love just about every single second of this. Not only do they say great things about our team, suggesting that the Thunder will run the league after LeBron and Kobe get a few years older, but they balance it out with great things to say about OKC. They bring up that the Hornets wished they could have stayed in this market. They bring up that OKC can be just as good a place to live for an NBA player as all but the 4-5 elite cities in the NBA. They also bring up that we're one of the new booming cities.

My thoughts is that this is exactly the kind of footage you take advantage of if you're the OKC Chamber. Take just the parts where it shows people on ESPN talking about how great OKC is, and you've got a slam dunk video to show people considering a corporate relocation or something.

Real hush-hush

The closely-guarded name of the new OKC NBA team has all of us scratching our head. Mainly those of us who hate the name 'Thunder' and have been pulling for 'OKC Barons'.

Surely these Okie billionaires have more taste than AC/DC and Thor (God of Thunder)-related team names. Most OKC fans do, and that's saying something...about AC/DC and Thor.

When KOCO-5 was the first to release the name will be Thunder, based on some fine Internet sleuthing when Clay Bennett was rumored to have parked the domain http://www.okcthunder.com/, we were all aghast with either rage or love over the name, then reassured ourselves it probably won't be Thunder.

Then all of the insiders were reporting: Thunder. The NBA accidentally put up www.nba.com/thunder for a brief hour or so. And when the NBA released OKC's 82-game schedule (which came underfire for excluding a single Saturday home game) it consistently called them the OKC Thunder. Then more insiders, and pretend-insiders from the SportsAnimal (which is when you know something must be false) claiming it will be Thunder.

Then a mid-afternoon text message issued out to all NewsOK.com users that claimed next week will be a press conference on Wednesday (as opposed to Thursday) where Clay Bennett will announce the team name, the Thunder.

And now that moving vans from Seattle have arrived in Downtown OKC finally, photographers embedded in the scene got a glimpse of boxes of this.

What if it's all meant to be too obvious? What if this is all to throw us off? Surely such a secret that Bennett's guarding so closely with this kind of obliviousness must be a throw-off.