Are the Celtics relocating to San Diego? 
its deja vu all over again!!!!!
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1356&dat=19780708&id=Of4xAAAAIBAJ&sjid=0wUEAAAAIBAJ&pg=7192,2032463&hl=en
Wow, that's some Celtics history I didn't know about. Fascinating.
Are the Celtics relocating to San Diego?
I think that you can argue that the Celtics moved to San Diego a long time ago.
What do you mean?
Owners of the C's and the then Buffalo Braves (latter moved shortly thereafter to San Diego and became the Clippers) swapped franchises and orchestrated probably the biggest trade in NBA history
"... in June of Our Year of the Lord 1978 -- that's the way they say things in Memphis -- the owner of the Buffalo Braves, John Y. Brown, and the owner of the Boston Celtics, Irving H. Levin, swapped franchises.
This is the story, somehow lost and forgotten through the annals of NBA history, despite it being a one-time occurrence:
In the mid-70s, John Y. Brown -- and I will call him John Y. Brown throughout his story, because everybody I spoke with about the guy called him John Y. Brown, as if John or Y. or Brown was seemingly too discreet -- was the owner of the ABA's Kentucky Colonels -- though I don't think his arena was named "The Bucket."
John Y. Brown, by all accounts a shrewd man, took a multimillion dollar payout to fold the franchise -- Rudy Martzke, the USA Today columnist who was then the public relations director for the Buffalo Braves, remembers it being about $3 million, though, he said, the details are a little hazy -- then John Y. Brown used that money to buy a stake in the Braves, who were owned then by Paul Snyder.
As an aside, Martzke says he sees John Y. Brown -- the former Governor of Kentucky who was once married to Phyllis George -- every now and again, and every time Martzke sees him, John Y. Brown introduces him to people and says, "Rudy used to work for me in Buffalo."
“ The league wasn't how it is now. But we were pretty threadbare, even by standards then. I had to do everything. Besides being an assistant coach, I had to do college and pro scouting. I had to miss several games on the bench because I had to do some scouting, so for a few games, Gene Shue was the only coach on the bench. ”
— Former Clipper assistant Bob Weiss
"What's funny," Martzke says, "is that I was gone by the time John Y. came to Buffalo. I had become the PR director for the St. Louis Spirits. So I never worked for him, even though to this day he thinks I did."
In any case, at the time John Y. Brown owned the Braves, Irv Levin owned the Celtics. But Levin was from Los Angeles, and what he really wanted to do was return to the West Coast and own a team there.
He couldn't very well take the storied Boston Celtics, who to that point had won 13 NBA championships. So Levin decided to switch franchises with John Y. Brown, who in 1978 had become sole owner of the Braves.
John Y. Brown, of course, was sly enough to know a good deal when he saw one, and he knew the Celtics were a better draw than the expansion Braves, so he jumped at the chance. As it turned out, John Y. Brown was only two years away from drafting Larry Bird.
Levin took the Braves and moved them out to San Diego, where he called them the Clippers.
As Paul Westphal, a former member of the Celtics remembers it, the franchise swap was not widely reported, and fans of either club were not really privy to what was happening behind the scenes.
Westphal remembers that the move was somewhat masked by a trade between the teams that sent Nate Archibald, Marvin Barnes, Billy Knight and future draft choices from San Diego to Boston in exchange for Kermit Washington, Kevin Kunnert, Sidney Wicks and the draft rights to Freeman Williams."
Taken from this article:
http://assets.espn.go.com/nba/columns/hughes/1164180.htmlLess than 50%
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