In Closing, Karl Keeps His Chin Up

George Karl’s 47th birthday contained the unforgettable and unprecedented, and those were both bad things. Tuesday’s season-ending 110-95 defeat against the Lakers was the first time the Seattle SuperSonics have lost four consecutive games under Coach George Karl.

It will be the last time they lose four in a row under him. They will never win four in a row for him again either. He won’t be there in training camp, won’t be there in the regular season.

Happy birthday, George. And happy trails.

He went out with a fanfare from the common man--a guy in the upper deck who tried unsuccessfully to start a “Keep George Karl” chant after the game.

He went out with a hug from an unexpected man: Shaquille O’Neal, who, in a surprising turn of events, was more supportive of Karl Tuesday than anyone in SuperSonic management has been for weeks.

What a year in Seattle, even by this wacky team’s standards. “Fellinic,” Karl called it.

Even as the team outplayed the Lakers and won the Pacific Division, there was growing speculation that Karl would not be asked back when his contract expired after the season.

He has survived successive first-round playoff exits in the past, but apparently he can’t survive this 61-victory season and a defeat at the hands of a superior Laker team that finally understands what it takes to win.

No player in the SuperSonic locker room cited coaching as the reason they lost.

“We need a big guy,” Dale Ellis said.

O’Neal dominated the whole series. It wasn’t Karl who went out and spent a salary cap-eating $33 million over seven years on Jim McIlvaine. That was Seattle’s big catch in the great free-agent summer of 1996, a center who didn’t start in Game 5 and played three minutes. His contributions were a missed shot and a personal foul.

That’s one reason Karl indicated he would want some type of general manager control in his next job. That and the fact that “I would definitely feel that you should never do this to somebody,” Karl said.

“This” has been the season-long dangling, that reached its bizarre peak today with eulogies for a team that was still alive and a coach who was still under contract.

The pregame scene was surreal, with Karl talking about seemingly everything but the upcoming game and the 3-1 deficit in the series. The topics ranged from what has been accomplished in his 6 1/2 years here, and what has been going through his head the last week. The more he went on, the more it became obvious he knew he would not be going on here.

It was a little like Jerry West’s news conference on the last day of the regular season, when he gathered reporters to tell them he had nothing to tell them, then all but announced his resignation on the spot.

Karl wears his heart on his sleeve. He showed so much emotion before Tuesday night’s game he could have used Sam Perkins’ 41-inch sleeves.

“I’m trying very hard to stay away from the emotional,” Karl said. “I can’t deny, over the last few days, I’ve broken down.”

A total of 357 regular-season victories the past six years is nothing to cry about.

But his teams have advanced past the second round of the playoffs only twice during that span, and that’s what his legacy will be. Seattle fans will never speak of “the glory years” of the George Karl era.

Whether or not the feeling is mutual, it’s obvious Karl will look back fondly on this time.

“I love Seattle, I love the fans, I love the tradition that we’ve built,” Karl said.

That’s where he started waxing a little too nostalgic, remembering things that didn’t happen. Sixteen championship banners hanging in Boston is tradition. Four Pacific Division championship banners hung in Seattle during Karl’s tenure is not. The fact that only one of those divisional championship banners is accompanied by so much as a Western Conference championship banner speaks volumes about the unfulfilled promise of this SuperSonic crew.

The off-season is here, once again too soon for Karl, and one time too many.

“I’d like just one damn time to win the last game of the season,” Karl said, “where I don’t have to persevere through the whole summer.”

What will he do? Well, he’s turned into such a fan of O’Neal that he said, “I think I’ll be in L.A. watching basketball” during the next few weeks.

If he wants, he can stick around until the fall and coach the Clippers. There’s a team for whom great regular seasons would be an improvement, not a setup for disappointment, and 61 wins means never having to cry.