Sonics' rebuilding looks more like demolition

That can't be all.

No team plays decent NBA basketball with a dozen forwards and no proven players at center and point guard.

At the moment, the Sonics roster is the hoops equivalent of Pam Anderson. It's going to topple over without some ballast and balance.

So any rational judgment about the biggest draft day in the Sonics' 40-year history must be reserved. More has to be coming.

Otherwise, Sonics fans would have to take owner Clay Bennett and general manager Sam Presti into the street and pummel them, and who wants to spend the impending holiday arranging for bail money?

Feel free to cheer the drafting of potential superstar Kevin Durant, who arrived via dumb luck.

Feel free to boo the trading of proven superstar Ray Allen, whose departure for unprovens and has-beens just may be dumb.

But the big picture for 2007-08 remains unknowable. And uncomfortable. Every move by Bennett will be greeted with suspicion, and every move by Presti is mysterious, because as a rookie he has no track record.

Bennett on Thursday called the moves "transformative," a word that presumes a plan toward improvement. That is yet to be known. At the moment, "blown up" fits better.

What can be reasonably surmised is that the departure of Allen was all about the Benjamins. Bennett wanted no part of the remaining three years of Allen's $80 million contract.

It didn't help that Allen is 32 next month and coming off surgery on both ankles. Yes, he had the top-scoring season of his career (26.4 ppg), but it lasted only 55 games because of injuries.

And if you believe in the sports-business axiom of trading a player a year early instead of a year late, a thin case might be made that Allen's time to go has come.

The problem is the same can be said for the franchise in Seattle.

Allen was the anchor, and now the club appears adrift, if it hadn't already. His departure plays into the notion that next season will be a lame-duck kiddie-fest as Bennett saves most of his resources and interest for the court fight to relocate the team.

The vacancy at the top of the roster is compounded by what was acquired from the Boston Celtics -- two back-ups in forward Wally Szczerbiak and guard Delonte West, throw-ins for salary-match purposes, and the No. 5 pick that became Jeff Green, a 6-foot-9 forward from Georgetown and the Big East Conference player of the year.

Although Green was on the radar of no one in Seattle because the Sonics had just drafted Durant and are favored to retain another small forward, Rashard Lewis, the kid sounds pretty good. At 6-9 and 235 pounds, he has bulk Durant lacks, and is considered a brilliant passer and solid defender. After his workout for the 76ers in Philadelphia, GM Billy King said, "To handle and shoot the ball, he's very impressive for that size to do those things."

Presti insisted that Green would be a great complement to the high-scoring Durant, except that the other forward is supposed to be Lewis, of whom the bosses reiterated it is their full intention to re-sign.

So at the moment it appears the Sonics have traded a seven-time All-Star for a rookie forward who will get maybe 20 minutes a game off the bench. The last time the Sonics traded their best player, Gary Payton in 2003, at least they acquired Allen from Milwaukee.

Not only did the Sonics get nothing approaching equivalence for Allen, they failed to get from the Celtics Theo Ratliff, a serviceable center who has just one year left on his contract at $10 million.

Ratliff would have been better at center than Robert Swift, who may not be fully recovered from knee surgery by the start of the season, and also had an expiring contract.

But that asset remains with the Celtics in case they want to make more moves.

If the Sonics plan to make more moves, their more tradable assets such as Luke Ridnour, Nick Collison and Chris Wilcox are all on multiyear deals. Not impossible, just harder.

One move that has become imperative is re-signing free agent Lewis. Despite Bennett's disdain for the NBA salary scale -- how he didn't know before purchasing remains a mystery -- every team has a big-money star. Without Allen, Lewis becomes the guy.

When free agency begins, a sign-and-trade with Lewis looms as a possibility, which could bring a veteran point guard or veteran center and relieve the jam at forward.

Yet if Lewis and Allen are gone, Swift returns and a new point guard arrives, that means a near-total lineup blowup. Obviously, after a 31-51 season that was the worst in 20 years, the case can be made that the outcome was merited.

But given the external circumstances about potential relocation, a case can be made that the relative unattractiveness of a cheap, imbalanced roster loaded with kids and no veteran leadership is of little concern for an ownership fixed on a spot two years down a Midwest road.

Oh, yeah. Durant. He should be fun. But only the Sonics could manage to overshadow his acquisition with anxiety.

Surely the Sonics have a few more circus moves. The fans' apprehension is that one of them is unplugging the calliope.