Take A Good, Long Look Sonics Just Might Surprise Their Detractors In Playoffs

In the last few weeks, George Karl discovered a new dirty word to include in his vocabulary:

scru-ti-nize (skroo-ti-niz) to look at or examine carefully.

Around this time last year, Karl was upset because he thought his team wasn’t being afforded enough attention for earning the league’s best record. All the talk was about the Knicks, or Charles Barkley and the Phoenix Suns, or somebody other than the Seattle SuperSonics.

The Sonics are getting all sorts of attention now after Shawn Kemp participated for Dream Team II as it dunked and taunted its way past all the opposition in its path at the world basketball championships last summer, then shot some commercials for a shoe company and became a nationally recognized celebrity.

Now, everybody starts looking a little closer at Karl’s team, and this bothers the coach. On Monday afternoon at the Sonics practice facility, somebody asked Karl about his team’s 1-13 record since November against the other top four teams in the Western Conference and whether that bears any significance on the playoff season.

“You guys love to scrutinize,” Karl said. “When we were going 1-13 against those teams, how’d we do against the Knicks and Orlando?

“You guys are trying to define the edge in the playoffs and I’m saying, as a guy who knows a little about the game, we don’t know what the edge is or who has it. I had the best record in the NBA last year and I didn’t think I had an edge going into the playoffs; I don’t understand how you can have anything but a remarkable respect for this team and all they’ve done in what has been a very unusual year.”

Karl might have trouble accepting this, but I empathize with his plight. He’s in a profession where, apart from staying out of jail, his whole job boils down to winning.

It is a heartless, demanding occupation and as I think back to the last couple of playoff years with Karl, two themes keep rising to the surface - lack of attention and too much scrutiny.

He’s going around in circles, perpetually badgered by those who aren’t watching closely enough and those who are watching too closely. In his mind, I’m sure Karl doesn’t feel paranoid because he KNOWS the press is out to get him. Just now, I think Karl would do well to give it all a rest and concentrate on getting his team ready to play some money games starting Thursday in the Tacoma Dome against the Los Angeles Lakers, the Sonics’ first-round playoff foes.

For more than a month, Karl has been telling anyone who would listen that the regular-season games were meaningless, that only the playoffs count. The Sonics seemed to feel the same way, losing three out of five the last week of the season. “Yeah,” Karl said, “but we won 13 of 15 just before that.”

Karl seems to think his team is capable of turning on the switch come Thursday night when the Lakers show up, and the results of this first-round series might indicate he’s right.

Despite the fact the Lakers beat the Sonics four out of five times in the regular season, Los Angeles is heading into the playoffs in even worse shape than Seattle. The Lakers have lost seven of their last eight games and looked like a team with tombstones in its eyes when they were routed by the Sonics last week in the Forum.

This is a series the Sonics could sweep, or win in four games. The Lakers seemed to be a team that simply ran the legs off themselves late in the season. Where the Sonics looked to be uninterested in the last week or so, the Lakers looked spent, shot, all done. The question is whether the Sonics can flip that playoff switch they couldn’t find last year at this time.

“My general opinion is that there’s always a ‘coasting’ to a certain extent in the regular season,” Karl said. “After it’s over, you have to reflect on the intensity level your team played with, and I think our team has been at a very high level in terms of intensity. From a year ago? Our level of professionalism has gone up a notch, I really believe that.”

Karl explained the slump last week by saying the loss to Sacramento “was really a playoff game for them,” and the defeat in Phoenix on Sunday could be chalked up to neither team having anything to gain from a victory.

“The only one I really had a problem with,” he said, “was losing to Portland at home, with the rivalry and all.”

So it’s all over now, this meaningless part of the season, and come Thursday, the Sonics will find the switch, flip it into the proper position and come out playing hard and smart.

One thing for sure is that the Sonics came away with the best bracket, playing the Lakers in the first round instead of Portland, a team that can rough you up and wear you out in five games. In the other bracket, the Sonics would have faced Portland, then probably Utah, a team that has played the whole season as though it mattered. Instead, they have a beatable team in the Lakers, followed by San Antonio, a team they split four games against this season.