Payton Making All the Right Moves

SuperSonics fans have a new nickname for Gary Payton. It’s just three letters:

“MVP,” “MVP,” they shout as he makes one dazzling play after another.

“I don’t like to talk about the MVP stuff,” said Seattle’s star guard, also known as “The Glove” for his defense. “All that stuff is crazy.”

Not really.

The 31-year-old Payton is playing his best basketball in his 10th NBA season.

He’s averaging career highs of 24 points and 8.9 assists after the Sonics’ season-best seventh win in a row, 104-96 over the Bucks on Thursday in Milwaukee against former coach George Karl.

Payton dominated the end of the game, scoring 7 points and forcing an important turnover in the final 1:57 after Milwaukee had tied the score at 92.

On Monday in Los Angeles against the Lakers, Payton’s 3-pointer with 15.9 seconds lifted Seattle to its biggest victory of the season.

The Sonics, a team that missed the playoffs last season, don’t look like they’ll miss out again. They were 27-13 going into the weekend.

Along with Shaquille O’Neal of the Lakers and Detroit’s Grant Hill, Payton is considered a top MVP candidate in the first three months of the season.

“He’s having as good a year as just about anybody,” second-year Seattle coach Paul Westphal said. “Gary is going to have to be mentioned in the NBA race if he keeps it up the rest of the year and our team keeps winning.”

With a rebuilt roster that includes new starters Ruben Patterson, Brent Barry and Horace Grant to go along with Vin Baker and Payton, the Sonics have been the NBA’s surprise team so far this season.

Payton shouldn’t be a surprise, though. A five-time All-Star who was an all-NBA first team selection in 1998, he’s doing what he’s been doing all along. Well, slightly better now.

“I’m having a more consistent year this year,” he said. “In other years, I would have good games for three or four games, then I’d have a mediocre game.”

Against his former All-Star teammate, Shawn Kemp of Cleveland, last Tuesday night, Payton showed another way he has changed this season.

Early in the third quarter, Kemp fouled Payton hard, knocking him to the floor. Then he helped him up. Payton, known as one of the league’s biggest trash-talkers, didn’t say a word.

“Normally, he would have said something,” Kemp said, noting Payton’s maturity.

Payton still has plenty to say, though. Just ask Westphal.

After the Lakers beat the Sonics by 24 points on Nov. 30 in Seattle, Payton went into Westphal’s office and exploded because he felt he was taken out of the game too early. Westphal doesn’t like to be berated, but he took Payton’s emotional outburst.

This is a superstar who is not easy to live with.

“He can get cantankerous from time to time,” Westphal said. “But he is a very, very tough competitor and I would always rather have a tough competitor who gets a little cranky sometimes than somebody who doesn’t compete and you end up trying to light a fire under them.”

Grant played with Michael Jordan on three title teams in Chicago in the early ‘90s. He thinks Jordan and Payton are the two most competitive players he’s played with in his 13 NBA seasons.

“For a guy who takes a team on his back like he’s done this year, he gets my vote for MVP,” Grant said.