Monkey’s Dead, And It Looks Like Houston’s Next

This just in: Ervin Johnson 12 points and six rebounds, Hakeem Olajuwon six points and four rebounds. The shaking you feel isn’t an aftershock, but merely Ripley rolling over.

Houston, you definitely have a problem.

Of course, the Rockets know this. They’ve known it for some time now, specifically the last 10 occasions they’ve met up with the Seattle SuperSonics. But a point in the NBA, we all know, is best driven home in the playoffs.

Saturday, it was driven home with a maul - 108-75, the biggest playoff win in Seattle history and the Rockets’ most inglorious defeat.

It was business as usual, if in the extreme: the Sonics own the two-time defending NBA champs. And ownership has its privileges, in this case a 1-0 jump in the best-of-seven Western Conference semifinals and the weightiest of psychological hammers.

Or how did Mario Elie put it?

“Fortunately,” admitted the Rockets’ swingman sub, “we didn’t play this team the last two years in the playoffs.”

That’s what the Sonics have been telling one and all, albeit in a whisper. Fancy claims get lost in the acoustics of first-round flops.

But KeyArena was a landfill of feelgood on Saturday, for two obvious reasons: The Sonics haven’t lost to Houston in two years (and have never lost a playoff series to the Rockets) and it was no longer the first round of the playoffs but the second.

Everybody exhaled that deep breath they took eight days ago before the Sacramento series and allowed themselves a deep swallow, instead.

And, hey - it went down.

The monkey - the one on Seattle’s back - is dead, Sonics coach George Karl declared. And before the afternoon was over, so much symbolic monkeycide had been committed - by the mascot, over the P.A., in the stands - that you half expected PETA protesters to arrive with an injunction. Karl himself, meanwhile, moved on to different metaphors.

“I feel like Linda Blair in ‘The Exorcist,”’ he said on his way out the door.

Hmm. Let’s hope his career doesn’t follow the same curve.

The party line is that, once rid of those first-round demons, it would be all rainbows and ribbons for Seattle - and there was no dissuading evidence Saturday. The harassing, hawking defense was back, the rebounding revived, the marksmanship nothing less than sensational. The Rockets hung tough for a half; in the third quarter, they were made to look very old, very slow.

“Of course there’s less pressure,” said guard Hersey Hawkins, amazed that the question needed to be asked. “We’re out of the first round.”

Hawkins wasn’t even around for those spectacular failures, and yet he claimed to bear the burden as much as Karl or Gary Payton or Shawn Kemp.

“Now that it’s over, I can say heck yeah I felt the pressure. If you’re in this (locker) room and everybody else feels the pressure, it’s going to trickle down to the guys who weren’t here. We’re a lot looser team now. A lot happier.”

And the stigma has moved down the hall, if there can be a stigma attached to a championship team.

Karl insisted before the series that “you can’t stop Hakeem - if that’s what we have to do, we’re in trouble.” But stop Olajuwon is exactly what the Sonics did - surrounding him with two and three defenders every time the ball went into the post. Patiently, he passed the ball back out - he took just nine shots, making three - and early on, his perimeter shooters made the Sonics pay.

But in the third quarter, Seattle’s defensive rotation caught up with the Rockets.

“Why do you want to change something that’s not broken?” said Elie. “We’ve got two rings. We’ve got the best post-up player in the game. Why not take advantage of it?”

But to Olajuwon, the advantage has never materialized against Seattle.

“We’re not going to beat them with that system,” he insisted. “There has to be a variation, different angles. We have to be more creative. We have to penetrate, make them pay for that triple team. That’s the only way to discourage them from that tactic. We have to play a different style of basketball to beat this team. We have to give them some homework to do. Right now, they’re giving us the homework.”

Even Elie acknowledged that “we were settling for the outside shot, which plays into their hands. Once you get it from the double team, you’ve got to try to penetrate, get some fouls, some easy baskets. You have to break guys down because they put so much pressure on you.”

And because Houston is just a middling team of shooters by NBA standards. After making eight of their first 10, the Rockets shot just 36 percent Saturday. In the four regular-season losses, Clyde Drexler and Robert Horry - their primary outside options - shot less than 39 percent.

“I’m not saying they can’t be beat,” Olajuwon said.

“It’s a seven-game series,” Drexler added. “There aren’t any panic buttons being pushed.”

“It’s one game,” Karl said. “All we’ve done, basically, is begin the chess match.”

But there’s no question: It’s Houston’s move.

, DataTimes MEMO: You can contact John Blanchette by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 5509.

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