Payton’s Place Often On Outside Strong During Regular Season, Sonics Guard Fizzles In Playoffs

Gary Payton is capable of raising havoc and championship banners. The league’s king of steals already has won his own title and now will try to lead his team to another.

The SuperSonics’ All-Star has become one of the top-three point guards in the league and figures to have a $50 million price tag as an unrestricted free agent when the NBA unveils its new models for the 1996-97 season in July.

But NBA general managers who are interested in signing Payton had best kick the tires and check under the hood. There are questions as to whether Payton is a money player. For all of his success during the regular season, Payton has been just like the team he directs, a disappointment in the playoffs.

All six years that he has been in the league, the numbers Payton put up during the regular season dropped in the playoffs, continuing a mystifying trend that began at Oregon State.

The Beavers qualified for postseason play all four years Payton performed there but never won a single tournament game, not in the NIT in Payton’s freshman year or the ensuing three years in the NCAAs.

In his first year, Kevin Johnson scored 28 points and led California past Oregon State 65-62. Payton countered with 13.

During his junior year, he couldn’t be faulted after scoring 31 points, but Payton’s team still lost, 94-90 to Evansville in overtime.

In his senior year in 1990, a season when Sports Illustrated put him on the cover and named him its player of the year, a season when he scored 58 points against USC, Payton went 3 for 12 and scored 11 points in a 54-53 NCAA opening-round loss to Ball State.

With the Sonics, Payton was a key member of the team that went to the seventh game of the Western Conference finals in 1993. But in the Sonics’ epic first-round defeats the past two years, he was largely to blame.

In both series, against Denver and the Los Angeles Lakers, Payton figured to have a considerable edge over the Nuggets’ Robert Pack and the Lakers’ Nick Van Exel, youngsters who had never been in a playoff game. But Pack and Van Exel repeatedly burned Payton and the Sonics.

To be fair, there are extenuating factors in Payton’s postseason failures. A player’s numbers frequently can go down in the playoffs, when the games operate in the halfcourt, and defense and opponents are tougher. Pack and Van Exel also took advantage of the Sonics’ trapping schemes, finding open areas, and not merely abusing Payton.

Coach George Karl also will say Payton struggled on offense because of constant double-teams. But great players find ways to overcome the tactics.

More concerned with defending adversaries than himself, Payton would not consent to an interview for this story. He has a skittish attitude toward the media and can be occasionally accommodating but frequently standoffish. It is an inexplicable pattern, such as his playoff performances.

Payton carries himself with an unbecoming arrogance, but the Sonics say he needs to be cocky on the court because that is when he excels.

“He plays with a chip on his shoulder,” teammate Nate McMillan said. “I want him like that. I want him angry. He plays better angry. When he’s quiet, it makes me nervous.”

Sonics fans should be nervous regardless. For all of his talent, there remain concerns about Payton’s attitude. His legs are two of the fastest in the NBA, his hands are two of the quickest. But Payton can be just as disruptive to his own team because of what’s going on upstairs.

In the first three games of the Lakers series, Payton admitted he was “trippin”’ - his way of saying he wasn’t really there mentally. The question of “why not?” seemed fair considering the magnitude of the situation, but Payton would not provide any reasons. One game later, the Lakers stuck their foot out and the Sonics went trippin’ right over it.

It is this type of attitude that has to be worrisome to the Sonics, although Karl said he is confident that Payton will be focused in the playoffs this year.

Asked how he would deal with Payton if he gets into one of his moods, Karl said: “I don’t know how I’ll handle that. I don’t think it’s going to happen.

“Gary’s strength this year has been his consistency. He hasn’t had the ups and downs physically and mentally that he’s had in other seasons.”

So there are promising signs. But with Payton, as well as the Sonics, you just never know.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Today’s NBA games First-round playoff matchups New York at Cleveland, 4 p.m. (TBS) Atlanta at Indiana, 5 p.m. (TNT) Portland at Utah, 6:30 p.m. (TBS) Houston at L.A. Lakers, 7:30 p.m. (TNT)