Boom OR Bust? : SuperSonics Possess the NBA’s Best Record, but Not the Respect a Top Team Can Expect

Somewhere between Los Angeles and Anchorage, the greatest team in the history of the 1993-94 NBA regular season awaits its reward.

And waits . . . and waits . . . and waits.

The Seattle SuperSonics have the best record, best finish (26-5), best point differential (nine a game, two more than the No. 2 Knicks), not to mention the most crowd-pleasing style.

Of course, few crowds get to see them.

In a crowning indignity, NBC scratched the SuperSonics’ late-season game with the Houston Rockets that matched the teams with the two best records and showed Phoenix-San Antonio, which featured the larger personalities of David Robinson and Charles Barkley. Barkley, demonstrating the candor stardom demands, called sportswriters a vulgar name on the air afterward.

The SuperSonics have only Shawn Kemp, who barely averages 18 points and doesn’t bite the heads off chickens.

You can see their problem.

“I honestly feel that sometimes we are treated like the rebels from South Alaska,” Coach George Karl says. “Why, I don’t know.

“We’re fun to watch. I think we play the right way. We might trash talk a little bit too much and we kind of get goofy every once in a while, but I think we play a brand of basketball that fans and players like to look at.”

Says center Michael Cage: “Last year we won 55 games. This year we come back and we kick butt the whole . . . year . . . long. Someone told us (NBC commentator) Bill Walton said that we wouldn’t beat Phoenix. I’m going, ‘My God, we got the best record in the NBA, the best home record, the best road record, what does it take to make you start giving us some slack?’ All of a sudden people look up and say, ‘Damn, Seattle’s got 63 wins?’ ”

Every franchise needs a longshot, but the SuperSonics have outdone themselves. One of their All-Stars, Kemp, didn’t play college ball and joined the league at 19.

Their other All-Star, Gary Payton, was a trash-talking showboat with so little respect, they offered him to Dallas for Derek Harper two years ago.

Their coach, Karl, had fled the NBA.

Legitimacy means something to anyone who has been denied it, which might explain why the SuperSonics seem to collect insults and store them close to their hearts.

Nevertheless, questions abound:

--Will their trapping defense work as well in the slow-down playoffs?

--How about their shaky outside shooting?

--Good teams are supposed to have a go-to guy, so where’s theirs?

--Who cares what you do in the regular season anyway?

*

Actually, the SuperSonics have already won. Five years ago, they were no one, headed nowhere. Now they are on top.

They began the ‘90s a carved-in-stone .500 team, roiling in frustration at their inability to repeat their ’87 drive to the Western finals.

They might not have been more divided than any team--guard Nate McMillan insists they were closer than they are now--but they certainly had more colorful fights. Once, the wives of Dale Ellis and Alton Lister rumbled. Another time, Ellis punched Xavier McDaniel, who was holding one of his children and had to put the tyke down before he could retaliate, perhaps explaining why Ellis is alive today.

Ellis had problems with DUIs, McDaniel with his knees, so a combined 40 points a night had to be traded. Go-for-it SuperSonic President Bob Whitsitt even traded for Benoit Benjamin on the theory, since discredited, that all they lacked was a center.

Whatever they did, the SuperSonics stayed .500.

They were 41-41 in Bernie Bickerstaff’s last season.

They were 41-41 in K.C. Jones’ first season.

They were 18-18 when Whitsitt pulled the plug on Jones the next season.

They were 2-2 under interim Coach Bob Kloppenburg.

Enter Karl.

The enfant terrible of his profession, he had been an NBA coach at 33 and left the league at 37 after impressive, combustible stints with Cleveland and Golden State.

He was serving his penance in Madrid when Whitsitt, sensing that recycling another nice guy wouldn’t do, flew over to see him.

“I know he wasn’t in the group of guys that you read about and hear about all the time,” Whitsitt says. “But for whatever reason, George made a lot of sense to me.

“I figured he was a very talented guy. He’d had some success very, very young. He showed me a lot by working hard and doing a great job and winning a championship in Europe and continuing to be a head coach after he pretty much got booted out of the NBA and sort of blackballed around the league. . . . The passion was still there.”

It wasn’t as if Karl took the job, gestured hypnotically and everything changed. But it was close.

Karl wanted to press and run. The SuperSonics, in no shape to run after having walked it up in Jones’ half-court power game, lost three of four.

The players waited to see if their new coach would grow fangs like a werewolf.

“Oh yeah, I thought we had a wacko,” McMillan said. “He came in with a reputation of a guy who was a little bit on the crazy side--a yeller, a screamer, sort of a wacko-type guy. That’s what I had heard of him. Watching him when he was at Golden State my first year here, that’s all I thought of him. He did the same things he does here--knocking on the scorer’s table, grabbing his head, spinning around.”

It just might have been a lunatic they were looking for, even a reformed one. The SuperSonics picked up the system and finished 26-12.

They went 55-27 last season and 63-19 in this one, making Karl 145-61.

They were entertaining too. In a slow-down era, the SuperSonics combined a tenacious defense that now ranks No. 5 in the NBA with a fast-paced offense that also ranks fifth.

In the era of the young and restless, Karl divides playing time among nine players. Kemp, the leading scorer, averages 12.5 shots. Nine players averaged more than 20 minutes. When Kendall Gill arrived, he told his old Illinois teammate, Nick Anderson of Orlando, he was sorry he had left Charlotte.

Said Anderson: “Kendall isn’t a 30-minute player.”

In a better world, players would understand, as Karl’s Tar Heel teammates understood when Dean Smith wheeled three units in and out at North Carolina.

“A little different?” Cage says, laughing. “That’s definitely putting it mildly.

“It takes a certain kind of player to deal with it. Most players want to play big minutes, they want to get a lot of shots. In this system, it just doesn’t happen. Everyone has to make a sacrifice, from No. 1 to No. 12.

“It’s something a player can compromise with. I don’t know if he ever really can say it’s comfortable because it changes all the time. Most people like to stay out there and get a feel for the game, but we’ve learned to play within that system. And as you can see, when it works, it works beautifully.”

Says Karl: “At the beginning of the year, you kind of set some goals with them. And you emphasize to them, please give me the whole season to get to those goals.

“It’s like Vincent Askew--the first four weeks of the season he was the kind of guy who gets left out a little bit. And I know it was bothering him and he got to the point where he got real frustrated with me.

“I said, ‘Vince, give me some time. Give me a season to help you.’ He hung in there with us and right now he’s probably in our top four guys.

“I don’t think the way we play, you can play 40 minutes. . . . I don’t want to play a style of game where 10% of the time, I’ll have one or two guys coasting or maybe even more. Old Celtic style was OK, ‘Let Bird do it this time, I’ll take my little three-minute break. OK, let Parish have it now,’ and Bird kind of had his break.

“I used to coach that game. We want to bring intensity and energy and attitude into as many possessions of the game as possible. And to do that, it takes energy.”

*

Energy, they’ve got.

Depth, they’ve got.

Whitsitt got Detlef Schrempf out of Indiana, but the SuperSonics had a loaded deck. Schrempf, about to become a free agent, had gone to college in Seattle and was building a home there.

But Whitsitt also landed Gill with the entire league bidding for him, also acquiring the right to switch No. 1 picks with Charlotte, which then fell into the lottery.

Now there are more combinations than you can count.

Center Sam Perkins and Cage play forward.

Kemp, a forward, plays center.

McMillan and Askew play guard or forward.

In effect, Karl has five guards, five forwards and three centers without using a player who couldn’t start elsewhere.

Attitude, they’ve got, too.

Tucked away in their corner of the country, they glow with the holy fire of undiscovered artists.

“Tell me why the Sonics get treated so bad by the national media,” Karl says, sitting by a hotel swimming pool in Marina del Rey. “Bill Walton just kicked our butts: ‘Seattle could lose to anybody any time. They could lose the rest of their games.’

“Then he says we don’t ever win a big game on the road. We’ve got the best road record in the league!”

A woman walks up wearing one of those hotel bathrobes, looking for a towel.

She sees Karl, dressed in T-shirt and shorts with his baseball cap turned backward.

“Do you have anything to do with this?” she asks.

It has been that kind of year, or life, or franchise. But their time is coming.