Wins within the Losses

Been thinking some about if Seattle were to get a expansion team a little lately. As great as that situation would be, I'm not sure potential fans of the team realize the reality of what exactly will be happening on the court. Long story short, we will be pretty bad for a while. In the NBA, you either build through the draft or free agency. As appealing Seattle could be to free agents, I'm not convinced big name free agents will be willing to sign with the building of a franchise. That means we need high draft picks and to get those draft picks we actually need to be bad. Nobody likes being bad, especially the kind of bad we will need to be, but when the Ls start piling up we need to be able to find the small victories. That will largely come in the form of player development. Watching a player rotate on time more often, or a decent post move will have to sustain us the first few years. I like to think of these small victories as Wins within the Losses; and if it still isn't clear, there will be a ton of losses. We will need to sustain ourselves on these small wins for a while and this is where I see a potential problem arising. No one likes losing and as ravenous as the Sonics fan base is I'm not sure the casual fan will take as much enjoyment from these small victories as the hardcore fans. Year one should be great, but when were losing in the 2nd and possibly third year I'm wondering how our attendance will be looking. Take the Charlotte Bobcats for instance. Their attendance hasn't broke the top 20 since they were awarded their expansion team. After everything we have gone through, I would hate for that to be the case if/when we get the team. Once we do get that team we have yearned for for what seems like forever it becomes "put up or shut up" time. I like to think we can support our team no matter how they are doing, but I'm a realist. No one likes losing and no one likes to be associated with losing. I just hope that people will be able to find those small wins in all those losses coming up. And who knows, I might be completely wrong and we might win 50 games when we get the team back.