Vin Baker & Wally Walker: House & Team Foreclosures-R-Us

June 23, 10:50 AMSeattle People ExaminerLaura Vecsey

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In an odd dovetailing of NBA misadventures, former Seattle Sonics president Wally Walker was just heard testifying in the Sonics trial about how he tried to save the doomed team from being whisked away to Oklahoma City. Meanwhile, across the country, Sonic bust Vin Baker is watching as bank officers are working to foreclose on Baker's Connecticut home.

Talk about a new kind of The Long Tail effect, wherein dumb people makng dumb decisions must therefore live with ramifications of those dumb decisions for years on end!

In 1999, after Vin Baker dogged it through a strike-shortened NBA season with the Sonics, it was Walker who vowed he would NOT let the 4-time NBA All-Star escape Seattle. This accounted for one of many of Walker's ill-fated signings, although Baker's boondoggle deal might have been Walker's most atrotious of all: $87 million to a power-foward with the intestinal fortitide of a cotton ball, not to mention a drinking problem.

The Sonics are moved out of Seattle in part because of the poor management of the NBA franchise by Walker, who never restored the Sonics to NBA contention after the departure of former Sonics head coach George Karl. If Howard Schultz could not summon enough support in the Washington state legislature and then decided to sell to the Clay Bennett & the Oklahomans, let's just say they're all reaping what was sewn.

As for Baker: Not only is he going to lose his house in a foreclosure auction, he also lost his restaurant: Vinnie's Saybrook Fish House, to foreclosure in February. Is this what they mean when they talk about chickens coming home to roost?