Oklahoma City Thunder

A small, American basketball team located in Oklahoma City is the Oklahoma City Thunder. The Thunder competes within the National Basketball Association as a member of the nba Western Conference Northwest Division. The team plays their home games at the Chesapeake Energy Arena. The team was first known as the Seattle SuperSonics, an expansion team which joined the NBA for the 1967–68 season. The SuperSonics moved in 2008 after a lawsuit that saw a settlement involving Clay Bennett's ownership firm and lawmakers in Seattle, Washington. The SuperSonics qualified 22 times for seattle's NBA playoffs, took their division six times, advanced to three NBA finals and claimed the 1979 NBA Championship. The Thunder had qualified for their first playoff berth in Oklahoma City during the 2009–10 season. They captured their first division title as the Thunder in the 2010–11 season, and their first Western Conference championship as the Thunder in the 2011–12 season, featuring in the NBA Finals for the fourth time in franchise history and for the first time since 1996, when the team was based in Seattle. The Chesapeake Energy Arena, which opened as the Ford Center on June 8, 2002, was built without lavish amenities but was designed to accommodate spacious "buildouts" should a professional sports team turn the Chesapeake Energy Arena into their home venue. It was completed at a loss of $89.2 million. In 2007 a plan was launched to improve this kind of build-out. It came in the aftermath of Oklahoma City-based ownership group purchasing the Seattle SuperSonics the previous October. A state ballot measure passed by a 62% vote on March 4, 2008, extended a 15-month old one-cent city sales tax to fund $101 million in budgeted arena upgrades and a proposed $20 million fitness facility for a relocated franchise. During the global crisis of 2008–10, a shortfall in sales tax-receipts delayed building work on the stadium. Revised plans raising the scale of a possible entry to the glass and abolished a court of action to resolve the shortage. Important construction work on arena expansion was also delayed from the summer of 2010 to the summer of 2011. The seating capacity for the arena is 18,203 for professional NBA Basketball games. Significant revisions have been made to plans for the Thunder's existing operational infrastructure, with a total cost savings of about $14 million. The construction date for the Thunder's practice center has been pushed back to around March 2011. Simmons indicated that the Oklahoma City bombing played a major part in the team environment, noting that Thunder General Manager Sam Presti has seen every single Thunder player at the Oklahoma City National Memorial and encourages players to look into the stands and understand that the event has deeply affected all the team supporters. He also admitted, however, that the fact that the Thunder is the only team in Oklahoma City in one of the nation's four major leagues contributes considerably to the dedication to the region. Thunder fans are also evidently much more likely to attend major home games than any other NBA fan bases. According to a source in the ticket industry, just five per cent of tickets available for sale on secondary market websites like StubHub for the 2012 NBA conference finals were for Thunder home games, and 10 tickets for Heat home games were registered for each ticket sold for a Thunder home game in the 2012 NBA Finals. The Oklahoma City Thunder unveiled its first logo on 3 September 2008. According to majority owner Clay Bennett, the team logo draws some of its characteristics from other Oklahoma sports teams including the Oklahoma Sooners and Oklahoma State Cowboys and Cowgirls The Uniform Definition was unveiled on 29 September 2008. A new uniform was launched on 8 November 2012 using only navy blue and white colours. The alternate wordmarks are written vertically, in contrast to their regular uniforms. A second alternative uniform was adopted on 1 March 2015. A white shirt with boots, in the center of the collar displays the small Thunder logo, and the shorts display bolts in light blue and sunset colours.