The legend of Oklahoma City’s allegedly haunted Skirvin Hilton — a frequent home away from home for traveling NBA squads — was covered in a January 12, 2010 CSTB post entitled, “Eddy Curry Emerges From Man’s Hotel Room, Offers Creative Explanation”. However, unlike the timid E.C. Suppression Ring, Magic coach Stan Van Gundy tells the Orlando Sentinel’s Josh Robbins it’s all a bunch of superstitious hooey.
Magic coach Stan Van Gundy is a man who takes a scientific approach to basketball, often relying on statistics to confirm or dispel his theories. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t believe the rumors either.
“I don’t buy into any of it,” he said about 90 minutes before Thursday’s tipoff at the Ford Center. “What haunts me are guys like Kevin Durant. So, I would say this building is haunted because of guys like him, as are most of the buildings in the NBA. I haven’t run into a haunted hotel, just haunted arenas.”
The sympathetic Eric Freeman of Ball Don’t Lie seems to concur, offering, “better to imagine Kevin Durant as some kind of willowy ghoul or Russell Westbrook as an ornery sleestak instead of fearing ghosts in a perfectly suitable hotel.” However, neither the journalist nor the coach have stopped to consider that perhaps fucked-up-goings-on in the Skirvin have less to do with the occult and more to do with the city’s proximity to a town in which levels of Chromium 6 in the water supply are more than 200 times the California’s proposed limit.