Supersonics Spent Summer Soul-Searching Many Questions Need Answering Before 1995-96 Season Begins

Sam Perkins made a great escape, jetting out of Seattle in early May in the aftermath of the SuperSonics’ second consecutive first-round playoff loss.

“I thought about it and thought about all the things you don’t know about this team,” said the Sonics center. “And I decided to stay around here until Memorial Day weekend. Then, I thought, ‘Hell, no, not this time. I’m going to Chicago.’

“But stupid me. The playoffs were in Chicago. I’m sitting there and everyone around me is saying that we had the team that should have been there in the end. It’s amazing. Chicago, Texas, Florida, everywhere I went, people always thought we were a finals team.”

Finding refuge, finally, on a beach on the Gulf, Perkins “cooled out and it faded away as it got hotter.”

“It” is the deep-seated disappointment that stems from having a season’s worth of work, including a 57-25 record, and National Basketball Association championship aspirations wiped out in less than a week, for the second straight year.

Each Sonics player found a different way of coping with the anger, sadness and self-doubt that accompanied Seattle’s collapse in the playoffs.

Point guard Gary Payton holed up in his Seattle home with his children, 7-year-old Raquel and 3-year-old Gary II. “I couldn’t go back to Oakland (Calif.) real quick,” he said, “because all my friends there would say, ‘You did it again!’

“So, I played with my kids. I tried to get my frustrations out by playing with them. My little son and my little daughter make me smile every time I’m with them.”

Shawn Kemp also turned to his family for solace. He traveled back to his hometown, Elkhart, Ind., immediately after the Sonics were eliminated and spent the summer with his mother and his older sister, Lisa, who taught him how to play basketball.

On several occasions, Shawn and Lisa talked about what could have been.

“I let her know how I feel and we looked at it together,” Kemp said. “I always like to go back home.”

His other outlet for his frustration was running. He spent extra time conditioning, and reported to camp in superb shape, 30 pounds less than his weight at the beginning of last season’s camp.

Unlike Kemp, team captain Nate McMillan didn’t have the opportunity to work up a sweat. For most of the summer he was restricted to crutches or a walking boot, after extensive surgery on his ankle.

Without a physical outlet, his mind worked overtime.

“From the time it happened until now I’ve been sitting back, thinking about what went wrong,” McMillan said. “‘What could be corrected? What can we do to improve?’ There’s a bunch of questions that you try to answer so that you can come back and bring them up to the team.”

McMillan plans to raise those questions after the Sonics roster has been reduced to 12. At that time, he’ll also ask his teammates to conduct a captain’s election. He is willing to serve as captain if elected, but he wants to make sure his teammates make a choice, unlike the past 11 seasons, when he retained his captaincy without an election.

Although McMillan is eager to deal with these issues before the season-opener, he didn’t want to think about them in the off-season.

“I basically wanted to forget about it,” he said. “It was devastating and depressing. My thing was, ‘It’s over.’

“But for what I thought we could do last season it was impossible to forget about. So I tried to keep my mind off it. I did a lot of things with my kids.”

Yet for six weeks, reminders persisted.

“ESPN, KIRO, the newspapers, the announcers for the NBA Finals, everywhere you went, you heard about the Sonics, basically blowing it again,” McMillan said.

Teammate Ervin Johnson put it in the hands of the Lord. “I prayed more and more, because prayer changes things,” he said.

Vincent Askew also sought divine intervention.

“I went to church and I talked to God to get myself together,” he said.

Then Askew went to the gym. Just four days after the Sonics were eliminated, he began preparing for 1995-96.

“I figured that we should have still been playing, so it was OK to be playing in May and June,” he said.

Forward Detlef Schrempf took a different approach.

“I really don’t think about it anymore,” he said.

Although Schrempf upset a few teammates who believe his critiques should not have been voiced publicly, he has no regrets about speaking out.

“We all have to look at ourselves,” he said. “No one played great in the series, except Shawn. We all have to look within and not point any fingers.”