From Unrest To Love-Fest After Off-Season Moves, This Year’s Sonics Get Along

Once - or even twice - upon a springtime, the Sonics’ splinter group was a many-splintered thing.

While five Sonics played for coach George Karl in the NBA playoffs, seven others might have had as many different agendas while sitting on the bench.

Last spring especially, when the Sonics suffered a second successive first-round elimination, several players wondered aloud why they had to trade their prime time for pine time.

Such dissension leads to tension, the kind Karl did not need as the Sonics tried to beat their playoff hex.

In his game plan for this season Karl recommended changes: Besides focusing play around the talents of Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp and jettisoning unhappy veterans Kendall Gill and Sarunas Marciulionis, the coach wanted a bench attitude tuneup.

How well the strategy and personnel changes have worked can be debated to wit’s end. But Wednesday, as they prepared for Game 3 of the Western Conference semifinals at Houston tonight, the Sonics seemed convinced this squad is more united than previous Karl editions.

The difference “is intense,” Karl said of the team’s unity and pep.

“Last year was awful.”

Sonics players have “been told that their enthusiasm is part of the way we’re critiquing them. We can’t make them be enthusiastic, but I think you’re seeing guys genuinely involved and caring about the team,” Karl said. “That, we haven’t had for a year or two.”

These guys are not suddenly the NBA’s version of Up With People. But the flushing of bad attitude with new blood seems to be the ideal Sonics tonic.

Eric Snow, the rookie guard, runs the gantlet of his teammates before pregame warmups to slap backs and palms. After games, forward David Wingate, the 10-year NBA veteran who joined the Sonics last summer from Charlotte, ritually slaps hands with every teammate in the locker room to foster unity.

What difference does it make when a teammate, instead of openly coveting your playing time, genuinely applauds your effort? The Sonics believe that exchanging the bellyaching for handshaking is one reason they survived a tight first-round, four-game series with Sacramento and lead the two-time defending champion Rockets 2-0.

“Just look at films. We had games in the past where we’d make a great play, come over to the bench and guys don’t even clap,” Sonics starting forward and former NBA sixth man of the year Detlef Schrempf said regarding previous teammates.

“Now you’ve got guys clapping, standing up, cheering … It makes you play better and feel better about yourself.”

There is no empirical measure of improvement in team spirit, and it would be especially hard to determine what is different in demeanor among squads that have averaged 60 victories the past three seasons. But it is something the Sonics can sense.

Center Steve Scheffler, for four years the Sonics’ version of former Boston Celtics towel-waver (and current head coach) M.L. Carr, appreciates the fact that he is not the only “rah-rah” guy this season.

He cites the Sonics’ rally from a late deficit in Game 3 at Sacramento for a 2-1 series lead as evidence that support and enthusiasm is widespread. Normally at a critical juncture the Sonics players would wait for a speech by 10-year reserve Nate McMillan, the career-long Sonic and acknowledged team leader.

But besides McMillan, Sam Perkins, Schrempf, Payton and Kemp each offered inspiring words in the space of a timeout, Scheffler said.

“The peripheral guys, the guys who are usually the rah-rah guys, didn’t really have a chance to say anything,” Scheffler said. “It was the nucleus of the starters who talked to each other and actually turned around and started talking to the whole team.”

Thanks in part to newcomers Snow, Wingate and Brickowski, Scheffler considers the bench attitude the best in his Sonics’ career.

“Compare this year to last year, and you look at how many guys complained: ‘Oh, why is coach taking me out?’ Or, ‘Why aren’t we doing this?”’ he said. “Now, you’ve still got a little bit of complaining, but overall it’s been very positive.”

But really, how much of a change has there been?

“If we had lost in the first round with this team, (critics) would have said the same things about this team,” reserve swingman Vince Askew said. “It’s just different personalities. A lot of people don’t like to cheer and all of that. They like to play. But it feels better when you’ve got teammates cheering for you.”