Is basketball finished in Sacramento? And will it return to the former host city of the Supersonics?
Reports surfacing Wednesday indicate that the Maloof brothers, who own the Sacramento Kings NBA franchise, are finalizing a deal that would sell the Kings to a group from Seattle.
Yahoo! Sports, which broke the news on Wednesday afternoon, says league sources indicate that the Kings owners are close to agreeing to a deal for $500 million that would sell the franchise to a group led by hedge-fund manager Chris Hansen and Microsoft chairman Steve Ballmer.
The group would then relocate the franchise to Seattle's Key Arena for the start of the 2013-14 season before they would move it to a brand new arena in Seattle.
The deal was so close that a source described it as being at "first and goal at the 1," a term from football indicating that only a yard separates a team from scoring a touchdown.
While the Maloofs would still retain " extremely small percentage of the team," they would relinquish their complete control of the franchise.
The news would mark the end of an era of basketball in Sacramento, where the Kings have played since 1985 after relocating from Kansas City. In its prime years, the Kings featured stars such as Mitch Richmond, Chris Webber, Vlade Divac, Peja Stojakovic and more recently, DeMarcus Cousins.
As far back as 2011, league commissioner David Stern had confirmed that the Kings and officials in Anaheim, Calif., were discussing the possibility of moving the franchise to Anaheim, but nothing ever came of those talks.
But Stern, in a recent ESPN.com radio interview, indicated that basketball was on the verge of returning to Seattle.
"There's so much activity now in Seattle," Stern said. "There's a plan for a building, land has been acquired, reviews are being undertaken. I think a predicate for a team is a building. I think those plans are underway. I think the answer to your question is yeah. I think there will be a team in Seattle again and I hope there will be."
Seattle was the home of the Supersonics franchise, which spawned one NBA Championship team in 1979. The team featured stars in the 1990s in the likes of thunderous dunker Shawn Kemp and NBA great Gary Payton, the duo which took the Sonics to the 1996 NBA Finals.
But the franchise relocated to Oklahoma City in 2008, taking with them superstar Kevin Durant, and were rechristened as the Oklahoma City Thunder, who made the NBA Finals last season.
The Maloofs has struggled financially in recent years, according to Sports Illustrated, the family forced to sell a large share of its stake in the Palms Casino in Las Vegas and its beer distributorship in New Mexico.