This does not a bad owner make

ESPN's Jim Caple goes a bit over the edge in his assessment of the situation regarding the potential move of the Seattle Supersonics to Oklahoma City:

It's official. Art Modell, Robert Irsay, Donald Sterling and Jeffrey Loria are off the hook. The worst owner in sports history is Clay Bennett.

Which is completely insane. It's really hard to compare Clay Bennett to Robert Irsay. Until somebody else moves a team in the middle of the night without telling anybody, Robert Irsay will burn in hell hold that distinction alone.

Let's face it: Bennett and company pretty much said from the get-go that their intention was to own an NBA franchise in Oklahoma City, and that if they did not get an arena deal in Seattle that the Sonics were heading south. That doesn't make somebody a bad owner. I would gladly trade the Sonics current situation for the crapfest we got regarding a certain football team that relocated to the midwest 23 years ago. Because while we were stuck with a two-faced SOB, Bennett's group has been upfront with their intentions and their negotiating posture.

Caple even tries to work in a lame pot-shot from three years ago:

This would sound a lot more convincing had his partner and minority owner, Aubrey McLendon, not already revealed to an Oklahoma paper earlier this year that: "We didn't buy the team to keep it in Seattle; we hoped to come here." (McLendon, by the way, was a big donor to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which gives you some idea of this group's tactics.)

Thanks, that was useful in this article.

Face it; there is no antitrust exemption in basketball like there is in baseball. Football teams, basketball teams, hockey teams can all for the most part be moved on a whim. Only on rare exceptions can these deals be avoided, and that's usually before the sale of a team takes place (such as the collapse of Jim Balsille's deals to buy the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Nashville Predators to move them to Hamilton, Ontario after pressure from NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman).

Just because a businessman buys a franchise and decides to relocate the business doesn't make them the worst owner in sports. Sure, there is plenty of room for this for an owner who does move a team. But one would be hard pressed to argue that Clay Bennett is a worse owner than Jeffrey Loria, Peter Angelos, Donald Sterling, Bill Bidwell, Robert Irsay, Daniel Snyder, Drayton McLane, or Malcolm Glazer.