This is an Associated Press story picked up from Phoenix. I'll have some reaction comments from local government folks later.

PHOENIX (AP) — League commissioner David Stern warned Thursday that if the SuperSonics leave Seattle he sees no way the NBA would ever return to the city.
“I’d love to find a way to keep the team there,” he said, “because if the team moves, there’s not going to be another team there, not in any conceivable future plan that I could envision, and that would be too bad.”
At a news conference following his announcement that the 2009 All-Star game would be held in Phoenix, Stern criticized the city of Seattle and the Washington Legislature for its handling of the issue of funding a replacement for Key Arena.
Stern repeated earlier criticism of Seattle’s mayor and City Council for promoting a measure, overwhelmingly passed by voters, that requires any funds to help build an arena earn money at the same rate as a treasury bill.
That measure simply means there is no way city money would ever be used on an arena project, Stern said.
He also lamented that the Legislature refused to even consider continuing a tax that helped pay for Seattle’s baseball and football stadiums.
“To have the speaker of the house say well, they just spend too much money on salaries anyway, so we need it for other things,” Stern said, casts aspersions on the whole league’s operations. “We get the message. Hopefully, maybe cooler heads will prevail.”
He was referring to a remark by House Speaker Frank Chopp last February when funding for a new arena in the Seattle suburb of Renton was proposed.
“They ought to get their own financial house in order when their payroll is over $50 million for, what is it, 10 players? I think that’s a little ridiculous,” Chopp said at the time. “They need to get their own financial house in order and if they did, they wouldn’t have to ask for public help.”
Stern’s comments were much tougher than the ones he made last June, when he said he believed the issue was “just going to work itself out.”
SuperSonics owner Clay Bennett told the NBA last Friday that he plans to move the team to Oklahoma City. When that move would occur depends on outcome of litigation with the city over the franchise’s KeyArena lease. The lease calls for the team to play in Seattle through the 2009-10 season, but Bennett wants out sooner.
As the issue becomes more and more contentious, Stern said he hopes “that a white knight that hasn’t existed before, somebody who has a building plan of how to keep the team there, will step forward.”
The commissioner’s comments came at the end of a news conference where he spent most of his time rehashing the one-game suspension of Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw for leaving the bench after San Antonio’s Robert Horry slammed teammate Steve Nash into the scorer’s table in last season’s conference semifinals.
NBA rules require a one-game suspension for any player who leaves the bench in such incidents.
This was the first time Stern had made a public appearance in Phoenix since that decision. He said the rule is clear and was established to prevent incidents that could result in serious injury. Making the rule subjective, depending on why the players were leaving the bench, “is a problem,” Stern said.
“The one that I lived through was that I was assistant to (then-commissioner) Larry O’Brien when Rudy Tomjanovich almost got killed coming off the bench as a peacemaker,” he said.
“That in some measure deeply affected his life as well as Kermit Washington’s,” Stern said. “If we had had that rule and enforced it that never would have happened.”
Tomjanovich, a player with the Houston Rockets at the time, was critically injured when he rushed the court during a 1977 game and ran directly into a punch thrown by Washington, then of the Los Angeles Lakers.
Stern said that when he recently brought up the idea of changing the rule, the ex-players on the NBA competition committee “thought I was out of my mind.”
“That’s a serious issue of large men coming off the bench,” Stern said the players told him. “It’s a scary place. When you’re out there, you just don’t know. When people come at you, you’re liable to do just about anything.”