Karl Finally At Ease

At fault or nearly fired - that’s where we had George Karl last May.

Now his bosses decide to guarantee his contract to coach the Seattle SuperSonics through 1997 and we wonder if that’s long enough.

Typically, Karl wonders, too. Even more typically, he grieves management’s lack of greater commitment at a particularly inopportune time - the middle of the NBA playoffs, when the usual strategy is to give peace a chance. But since he’s coaching the hottest thing on lacquered maple, it figures to be his most opportune time, right?

Anyway, now it’s yesterday’s news - the Sonics having embarked so smashingly on another playoff adventure.

Coach Karl: from great to ingrate and back again before the buzzer sounds.

Heading into Game 2 of the Western Conference finals tonight, the Sonics own this town - or they would if the greedheads upstairs didn’t insist on local TV blackouts to suck every last nickel out of the pay-per-view saps. The home team is terrorizing Dream Teamers and Hall of Famers and can’t roll anything but sevens, and nothing about the current story is more compelling than the evolution of George Karl which occurred well in advance.

Maybe we should mention here that he didn’t get a single vote for NBA Coach of the Year. Electoral matters in the sporting press are routinely cheesy - Mo Vaughn, white courtesy telephone, please - and so was this one, though it wasn’t without rationale.

After all, the voters had seen George Karl’s teams gobble down 60-odd wins before and promptly choke on dessert. Actually, they’d seen it twice.

So Karl isn’t kidding himself about the root of the roll his team is on right now.

“We feel good about ourselves,” he said Sunday. “And a lot of that has to do with the monkey we killed in Sacramento.”

Getting past the first round, he means.

“We can look at our past now and say we’re a good basketball team,” he said. “We removed this story that said we were bad - we knew we were good, but everybody said we were bad. It’s gone now, and psychologically it’s made us much stronger.”

Now, some of us remember George once saying the psychology of basketball was mostly bunk. But to appreciate Karl is to embrace his inconsistencies.

He has insisted the true measure of success is the NBA’s regular season, then said “the playoffs are why you coach.” Indeed, the expectations that have dogged the Sonics these past three years were born from his own team’s unlikely run to within a win of the NBA Finals in 1993.

“I honestly think the regular season produces what you are,” he said, “but there’s a degree of fraud in the intensity of the games. If you have talent and can play with intensity most games, you’ll win. In the playoffs, everybody raises their intensity.”

Except the talented Sonics, who mostly just raised their tensity.

For that, Karl should and did shoulder the bulk of the blame. His mind and mouth games alienated his stars and foot soldiers alike, fueling insecurities and fostering a mistrust that doomed any playoff enterprise.

Apologists pointed to the youth and immaturity of the Sonics’ franchise players, but be real - the Nuggets and Lakers were not exactly relying on wily veterans, either. Their frailties were, however, better managed.

“I got in the way,” Karl has said. “I let it become personal.”

And now he has struck a most remarkable peace - last year’s dysfunctional family having evolved into virtual Cleavers, though most days Wally and the Beav won’t talk to the media. ‘

‘He’s more relaxed with us,” said Vincent Askew, a Karl protege since his CBA days. “The atmosphere is looser. There’s more trust, more confidence. I don’t think you can overestimate what he’s done for this team.”

Amazingly, no one seems looser than Karl. There was a moment early in the playoffs, when the action at Key Arena was whistled to a stop under the basket far from the Sonics bench. The ball got loose and rolled past midcourt, where Karl stepped lightly to scoop it up - and then playfully dribbled toward the referee, as if ready to shake and bake and take it to the rack.

A trip the finals would probably chase away the last of the demons, for then the Sonics would finally be underdogs again and, presumably, more appreciation would be forthcoming - from within the organization and without.

“You all don’t understand how great these guys are,” Karl said as the playoffs began. “We have great human beings on this team. I’m going to have lifetime friends from this team - four or five guys who when I’m 60, we’re going to be drinking beer talking about the season of ‘96. No one picks up on that. They want to pick up on our emotions, our negatives.”

Hard to pick up on the negatives of a champion, he was told.

“That comment to me is disrespectful,” he said. “I honestly think this team has won. To win 60 games a season over four seasons - how many teams have done that? And that doesn’t mean anything?”

It means something. But when he’s 60, those beers won’t be hoisted to toast February triumphs over Golden State - but to the validation of May and what made it possible.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review