WEEPLESS IN SEATTLE

Ah, harmony, it’s so . . . unusual.

For 10 years, the Seattle SuperSonics were the cuckoos’ nest of basketball, but it’s a surprising, new day in the Pacific Northwest.

Gary Payton grew up. Shawn Kemp shipped out, taking that alarm clock with the loose circuit that always seemed to be letting him sleep through practice. Dale Ellis played for enough bad teams to gain some perspective, which was good news for Washington traffic cops, and returned to find all the members of the SuperSonic family he (or his wife) had tangled with were gone.

These days, the SuperSonics practice diligently, know their roles and show up each night to play--just like a basketball team!

Not that they’re pinching themselves or anything.

“It’s almost scary, I hate to say it, but everything has been so perfect,” guard Hersey Hawkins said a month ago.

“What I have is very, very--I don’t even kind of want to talk about it because I’m afraid it will go away,” said Coach George Karl last week, during the free trip to New York his team won him as coach of the West all-stars.

With the SuperSonics, the possibility of “it” going away is never far away, and so it remains as the last months run off Karl’s contract. Given his importance to the franchise (great), his anger at being put off by management (also great), the pay scale for top coaches (extremely great) and the front-office’s capacity for soothing ruffled feelings (nonexistent), the situation could be called “fluid.”

If an early playoff exit or two may have encouraged them to forget what he did for them, Karl is to the SuperSonics what Dr. Frankenstein was to Frankenstein. Before he breathed life into them, they were stiff, or at least hopelessly mediocre, a carved-in-stone .500 team that had gone 100-100 under K.C. Jones and, just to prove it wasn’t a fluke, 2-2 under interim coach Bob Kloppenburg.

Arriving from Madrid, where he’d been exiled until he grew up himself, Karl went 2-4 while whipping them into shape to play his trapping defenses, finished 25-11 and has since averaged 59 victories a season. Only Chicago’s Phil Jackson has done better in that time, and he had Michael Jordan.

Of course, Payton was 23, Kemp was 21 and the center was Benoit Benjamin. It took many twists and turns after that, including the hell Kemp put them through last spring, but then came the Vin Baker trade, the acquisitions of their veteran reserves and here they are.

Not that it was a surprise or anything.

“As of about Sept. 15, I didn’t even know if I was going to come back and coach,” says Karl. “So many things happened right at the end--we get Jerome Kersey, we get Dale Ellis.

“I mean, Dale Ellis is working out with our basketball team--as a Denver Nugget. And we’re watching him work out and we’re saying, ‘Hey, this guy is in better shape than our rookies. He’s 37 years old and he’s outrunning everyone. And we’re afraid of his age? What are we, being dumb here or something?’

“Then we pull the trigger on Vin Baker [on Sept. 25]. On Sept. 15, I don’t even have a guy I think can replace Shawn. I’m playing Aaron Williams at four [power forward], Jim McIlvaine at five [center]. . . . I’m looking at, if we can coach our butts off, we’re going to win 43, 44 games.

“And I’m going, why do I want to go through that?

“But we go bang, bang, bang. . . . We go on the practice court and I think it was pretty clear pretty early that we were going to be pretty good.”

So they are. The last thing they need now is one of their old “distractions,” like the media blowing up this coach thing--after the coach has done 30 minutes on his contract situation. Karl manages to zip it up for months at a time, but then he gets down or finds himself in a big city, surrounded by interested-looking reporters.

“We don’t even hear about it,” says Payton, showing his new, diplomatic side. “I mean, you guys [reporters] are the ones who come and put it back in our face. . . .

“We’re not worried about that. I mean, they [management] know. I’ve expressed my feelings about that. I don’t think I could play for no other coach right now. . . . I would make a big fuss about that [losing Karl]. I hope they [management] just go ahead and do whatever they got to do, but we’re going to wait till after the season. I think the organization is doing a good job with it and I think Coach Karl is doing a good job with it.”

The players are waiting for Payton to drop the manners and make it clear they want their coach. Recently, a Seattle writer suggested to a veteran that Payton may soon go off.

Said the veteran: “He should.”

The Bad Old Days

“It’s waking up at 6 o’clock and looking at the sun come up and saying, ‘Why?’ ”

--Karl, after Denver’s first-round upset of Seattle in 1994

Not that Karl or Payton or Kemp started this stuff. The SuperSonics were a strange brew before they got there.

There was the fight in the Coliseum corridor between Ellis’ wife, Monique, and Alton Lister’s wife, Bobbi Jo, who had come to the game with her sister, both of them dressed in jeans and sweatshirts, looking, an arena policeman told the Tacoma News Tribune “like they were ready to rumble.”

There was the Ellis-Xavier McDaniel fight, when Ellis punched McDaniel, who was carrying his young son, in an elevator in the team’s offices. McDaniel handed the boy to video coordinator Paul Woolpert, knocked Ellis through the double doors and they proceeded to Queen Anne Street, stopping traffic.

Karl arrived in 1992, after a light bulb went off above General Manager Bob Whitsitt’s head. But Whitsitt left after the Nugget debacle (during which Payton and teammate Ricky Pierce almost went at it in the dressing room), tired of dealing with short-fused owner Barry Ackerley, leaving Karl without a protector.

That summer, the SuperSonics almost traded Kemp to the Bulls for Scottie Pippen. Kemp, hurt, stayed out of camp until they tacked a $14.6-million balloon onto his contract. Trying to tighten the screws, Karl rode sensitive guard Kendall Gill until teammates publicly sided with Gill. The Lakers KOd them in the first round again, as Payton showed up late for a game.

The next season, they made the NBA finals and Kemp was alleged to have “matured.” The next summer, they signed McIlvaine to a contract bigger than his and he regressed, all the way to Cleveland, it turned out.

Last spring turned into a nightmare of Kemp absences, media accusations and massive SuperSonic responses, including the affidavit players signed, affirming Kemp had never told them he had a drinking problem.

Karl was caught in the middle of a no-win situation, lost. Once, after he forgave Kemp publicly for a no-show, General Manager Wally Walker disciplined Kemp. Meanwhile, Kemp was privately blaming Karl for leaking the drinking-problem story to the New York Post’s Peter Vecsey.

The SuperSonics were knocked out in the second round. It wasn’t even a surprise.

“Well, you know what really got ugly, to be honest with you, was the trust issue,” Karl says . “All of a sudden with the Vecsey stories, everybody was saying, ‘Well, he [Kemp] doesn’t trust the organization, he doesn’t trust George.’

“And that hurt a lot.”

Not only did it hurt, it threatened to pull the team down around them. However confused, Kemp was a major star, and replacements are hard to find.

Luckily, the rebuilding Cleveland Cavaliers needed a major star, who didn’t think northern Ohio was next to Mongolia. The Cavaliers had a point guard and a power forward, Terrell Brandon and Tyrone Hill, to give the Milwaukee Bucks, who had an oversupply of scorers and shipped Baker to Seattle.

Baker isn’t as explosive as Kemp and he had led four Buck teams to 50 losses. However, since his arrival, everyone was pleased to note he was only about 1,000 times as poised as Kemp, and a more dependable low-post scorer. When the Cavaliers played in Seattle, a SuperSonic fan held up a sign that said: “Thanks Shawn For Sending Us Vin.”

Such swaps rarely work, and never without a long break-in period, but this one has been seamless.

“I used to bring my friends to practice with me,” says the enchanted Baker. “I kept looking at my friends all the time and going, ‘Wow! We’re good, man!’ I think I knew it in training camp, that we had an opportunity to be good.”

Said the Indiana Pacers’ Larry Bird, after a recent loss in Seattle: “Sometimes when you play them, you wish Shawn Kemp was in there.”

You know how good it feels, if you’ve been banging your head against the wall and then you stop? Ask Karl, this is even better than that.

“It’s not only fun, it’s kind of easy,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s my maturity or experience but wow! Some of the other teams I’ve had to coach. . . .

“They understand what I’m trying to do, there’s not much bickering. You’ve got a lot of old guys, all they want to do is win. You sit ‘em on their butts, they accept it. We don’t have a lot of ego guys that have to prove themselves. Vin’s on a contract mission, probably.”

What could go wrong now?

Oops, There’s One Problem

There are coaches who can handle ambiguity and conceal anxiety, who could stay cool, who might have a friend talk to interested teams while they appear to stay out of it and, perhaps, later fax in their resignations.

Karl isn’t one of those. If he feels it, sooner or later he’ll vent it, as when he recently said management’s failure to re-sign him last summer betokened “unbelievable disrespect.”

No, no, no, he’s not retracting anything but. . . .

“What you’ve read is the 5% of the time I’ve had a little depression or frustration,” Karl insists. “Ninety-five percent of the time, my team’s been great, I’ve been excited about coaching, more so than ever before. It’s probably the best team I’ve ever had. And I’m not going to get in the way of that.

“The whole thing comes down to, the closer we get to the end of the season, the more you’re going to read about it, the more you’re going to hear about it--and the more I’m going to have to handle it. . . .

“What’s going to happen is, we’re going to try to win a championship. Once it’s over, I’m probably going to run away for a couple weeks and my phone number is in the McCall, Idaho, phone book and if anybody wants to call me, they can call me.”

It shouldn’t have come to this, but then, that’s the SuperSonics too. The owner, Ackerley, an advertising magnate, lets the general manager, Walker, a former player and stock broker who was brought in when Whitsitt fled, front for him.

Unlike Whitsitt, a real NBA general manager who could finesse anything--in a recent Sports Illustrated poll, agents named him among the league’s best, worst and toughest general managers--the buttoned-down Walker goes strictly by the book. Walker says they’ll talk after the season, seemingly oblivious to the risk the organization is running.

If the season ends well, even Walker and Ackerley should be up to retaining Karl for something like $5 million a year. Of course, if things don’t end well, there will be the usual recriminations and the moose may be on the loose.

So these happy SuperSonics had better enjoy what they’ve got while they’ve got it.

By the way, the area code for McCall, Idaho, is 208.

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Karl’s Coaching Record

Coaching record of George Karl. He won division crowns with the Seattle SuperSonics in the 1993-94, 1995-96 and 1996-97 seasons, and reached the NBA Finals in 1996, losing to the Chicago Bulls in six games. He has a regular-season winning percentage of .603:

Year Team Record

84-85 Cleveland: 36-46

85-86 Cleveland: 25-42

86-87 Golden St.: 42-40

87-88 Golden St.: 16-48

91-92 Seattle: 27-15

92-93 Seattle: 55-27

Year Team Record

93-94 Seattle: 63-19

94-95 Seattle: 57-25

95-96 Seattle: 64-18

96-97 Seattle: 57-25

97-98 Seattle: 38-11

TOTAL: 480-316