Could Buddy the Dog From Air Bud (1997) Have Saved the Seattle SuperSonics?

With the NBA Finals looming and just four teams remaining, the Oklahoma City Thunder are in the hunt for their second straight championship. They’d be the league’s first back-to-back champs since the Golden State Warriors repeated in 2018.

If you don’t follow the National Basketball Association—and please bear with me if you don’t, because I promise today’s newsletter isn’t sports journalism—you might be wondering up to three things right now: 1. Why are they still playing basketball when it’s almost June? 2. How did such a small-market team build a potential dynasty? 3. Wait, why is there an NBA team in Oklahoma City anyway?

The first question is relatively easy to answer: Basketball season is too long.¹ I’ll let The Athletic answer the second question, which is only interesting if you care about ball. The third thing however, can be blamed on—or at least understood by—the infamous children’s classic Air Bud.

Up until this spring, I had never experienced the cinematic pleasures of Air Bud or any of its 14(!) sequels.² I was of course familiar with its most iconic line—“Ain’t no rules says a dog can’t play basketball.”—which is so philosophically rich that it has entered the current political discourse.

But the film surprised me in a few ways. For one, it’s not half bad, especially for a live-action Disney film. There’s a cute dog that can do impressive basketball tricks. There’s a pair of acting legends—Michael Jeter and Bill Cobbs—committing to the premise so earnestly that you’d think it was a Shakespearean tragedy.

And there’s a healthy dose of Seattle SuperSonics lore. Which made me wonder if Air Bud accidentally cursed the franchise.

The story begins on a somber note as a mourning family of three moves to the fictional town of Fernfield, Washington, which is somewhere near Seattle and/or the Canadian border.³ While 12-year-old Josh has no attachment to their local NBA team—he was probably a Bulls fan, as anyone under the age of 20 was back then—he’s exposed to Sonics fans soon enough through lunchboxes and other memorabilia. Most notably, there’s a kid on the basketball team who has a “lucky” orange peel that was discarded by Bulls legend Scottie Pippen at Sonics game. And if that wasn’t enough faux magical discarded fruit, he’s got an apple core that he pulled out of Sonics icon Shawn Kemp’s trash.⁴

I couldn’t say if Air Bud was intentionally SuperSonics-coded in the script or if they simply picked the team closest to their shooting location to add a layer of authenticity. But the timing worked in their favor.

After making the NBA Finals in 1978 and then winning a championship the following year, the Sonics maintained an impressive level of success for the next two decades. They made the playoffs in all but five seasons from 1975 through 1998, in fact.⁵ And the summer of ‘97 looked like the perfect time to drop a Sonics-centric piece of media. They’d just gone toe-to-toe with the Bulls in the Finals a season ago and were gearing up to defend their Western Conference crown—and possibly even win it all.

Unfortunately, the Finals loss to the Bulls in ‘96 was the beginning of the end for that era of the SuperSonics—and the franchise as a whole. After Air Bud was released, the Sonics only won two total playoff series in their last 11 years before the team was uprooted and moved to Oklahoma City despite the fact that they’d just drafted a future hall of famer in Kevin Durant.⁶

Is Air Bud to blame for the Sonics’ uninspiring final decade and their relocation from the Pacific Coast to the Great Plains? Probably not, though it simply can’t be proven one way or another. But if the SuperSonics ownership had paid attention to the film, it could’ve actually saved the franchise.

The final act of Air Bud plays out pretty much as expected if you know the premise: Josh and his team make the championship game but find themselves down a player due to injury, but also because two of their teammates suddenly moved to Canada mid-season.⁷ And wouldn’t you know it, Josh’s trick-loving dog Buddy gets to join the team for the final minutes of the game because ain’t no rules says he can’t.

Josh’s team—curiously named the Timberwolves after one of the Sonics’ conference rivals—wins the championship, and Buddy gets all the attention, of course. It’s an improbable and sensational story.

But it’s just the icing on the cake. These middle school Timberwolves don’t really win the championship because of Buddy. They don’t even make the championship if not for their new coach Arthur Chaney (played by Cobbs), the school janitor who got the gig after Josh discovered that he used to play for the NBA’s fabled New York Knicks.⁸ In stark contrast with their previous coach, who was as underqualified as he was dickish, Chaney brings real ball scholarship to the squad and turns things around almost overnight. Of course, he doesn’t get an ounce of credit for the team’s success because he’s not an adorable golden retriever.

There’s a lesson to be learned here, and one that could’ve saved the Sonics: Distractions can be strategic when there are tough decisions to be made. When things started going downhill for the Sonics in the mid-00s, the state and local governments didn’t want to bail the team out, the organization needed to be restructured, and it seemed like nothing could’ve solved their problems.⁹

Except for one thing. As notoriously unproblematic athlete Tiger Woods once said, “winning solves everything.” And because the players and the coaching staff weren’t getting the job done, maybe all Seattle needed was a cute, cuddly gimmick like a new four-legged teammate to distract sports media from their internal issues while they cleaned house and installed new leadership, just like the Fernfield Timberwolves did.¹⁰

Basketball (and Buddy) saved Josh from the grief that comes with losing his father. Maybe basketball (and another Buddy) could’ve saved the Seattle SuperSonics. Unless, of course, the NBA added a rule saying that a dog can’t play basketball.

Air Bud is now streaming on Disney+, and it is available for rent elsewhere.

1. So is baseball. And now football is too. Why are these seasons getting longer instead of shorter?

2. This is what I get for letting my oldest stepdaughter pick our Saturday morning movie. But it could’ve been much worse. Like when I let my youngest stepdaughter pick The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl.

3. The film was shot in Vancouver, so it does feel authentic to its setting. (Also, Vancouver looks beautiful.)

4. This kid also has a piece of used Juicy Fruit that was chewed by Dennis Rodman. What a disgusting young man. His parents need to teach him about autographs and Polaroids so he doesn’t have to keep actual garbage in their home.

5. Okay, I know I said today’s newsletter wouldn’t be sports journalism, but it’s easy to forget about the Seattle SuperSonics.

6. It’s rare, but seeing a Durant Sonics jersey in the wild fills me with all kinds of emotions. Imagine what could’ve been.

7. This plot point raised so many questions for me. One kid moving across the border in the middle of the school year might’ve been just an aberration, but two? What caused both of these families to flee the country? And these are just the two that we know of because they were on the basketball team. How many kids at this school were suddenly sent away to British Columbia? What was causing this mass exodus?

8. I like to think Arthur Chaney was named after John Chaney, head coach of the Temple Owls for a whopping 24 seasons. Also, I just discovered that John Chaney coached at a Division II school called Cheyney State before he went to Temple, which is hilarious.

9. Other than a benevolent billionaire. I suppose that could’ve solved their problems. (Where were you when Seattle needed you, Bill Gates?)

10. Yes, the team in Air Bud did these things in the opposite order. But because they were within a month or two of each other, I choose to see them as parallel events—ones that any professional sports franchise can learn from.