This morning, before the Sonics trial started, I said I’d be scared to face off with sassy Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis if I was one of Clay Bennett’s lawyers.

Unfortunately for the city, Ceis wasn’t the witness this morning. Mayor Greg Nickels was.

Bradley S. Keller, Bennett’s stentorian lead attorney, eviscerated Nickels in this morning’s opening round. (He also made the city’s attorney, Jeffrey Johnson from K&L Preston Gates Ellis—who was prone to freezing up into anxious minute-long silence when his exhibits were tossed, couldn’t identify documents, couldn’t get an objection sustained for his life, and elicited an incredulous, “That’s your response to his objection?” from Judge Marsha Pechman—look like an amateur.)

The defining (embarrassing) moment for the mayor came when Keller—silver hair, black glasses, trim, a sense of pacing and drama—asked a red-faced Nickels if he supported the behind-the-scenes-strategy of forcing Bennett’s Sonics to stay in Seattle for another two years because it would make the team bleed money, forcing Bennett to sell. Nickels, prone to preface every answer with “I believe” or “as far as I know” said, definitively for once, “No.”

It was the wrong time for Nickels to be so adamant.

Keller went to the video tape of Nickels’s deposition, at which Nickels said “Yes” and “absolutely” when asked if he agreed with employing such a strategy.

This was more than merely a gotcha moment. The point was also central to Bennett’s defense—which, in part, aims to prove that the city has been actively trying to sabotage Bennett’s chance for success in Seattle.

Keller’s other ace was a 2006 report commissioned by Nickels himself that found the KeyArena lease and KeyArena itself were not economically viable. This is Bennett’s main argument for moving the team. As Keller said repeatedly in his opening statement and while cross examining Nickels: The “economically dysfunctional” lease and outdated KeyArena do not allow the Sonics to “have the revenue to be a successful NBA franchise.”

Nickels was backed into a corner here and had to concede that, indeed, the revenue sharing agreement in the lease wasn’t good for the Sonics and KeyArena wasn’t profitable in the “long term.”

However, I’m not sure this argument will carry the day for Bennett. After all, the city did offer to re-negotiate the lease, an offer Bennett wasn’t interested in.

Keller kept returning to the idea that a fundamental principle of the lease—in addition to the fact that the lease stipulated the Sonics play there for 15 years—was that it had to be economically viable for the Sonics. Okay. But why, then, didn’t Bennett make a good faith effort to re-negotiate the lease when the city made that offer?

We’ll see if the city pounces on this overarching flaw in Bennett’s case. The point of the crummy lease plays well in its own right, but taken in the larger context, it actually raises a damning question for Bennett: Why is he trying to get out of the lease before even attempting to re-negotiate it?