Waking Up To A Nightmare Sonics Brace Themselves For ‘The Dream’ To Bounce Back

Let’s say you are the Houston Rockets. You’re down 2-0 in your Western Conference semifinal series with the Seattle SuperSonics. And you’re down because the Sonics have hit 30 3-pointers and Hakeem Olajuwon has scored a combined 23 points.

What could you be thinking?

“If I were them,” Sonics co-captain Sam Perkins said, “I would be thinking, ‘Damn!”’

And then you hope for a return to normalcy, when the Seattle 3s stop dropping and the basketball world resumes revolving around your superstar center.

Although Games 1 and 2 were dream scenarios for the Sonics, they still are bracing for the nightmare. The law of averages, and the law of Hakeem the Dream, are bound to catch up. Maybe as soon as Game 3 in Houston Friday night.

“He’s going to be there,” Sonics reserve center Frank Brickowski said. “You really can’t count him out.”

Not if two games constitute a trend.

Olajuwon, who averaged 26.9 points on 51.4-percent shooting during the regular season, had only six points on 3-of-9 shooting in Game 1. The Rockets lost by 33 points.

In Game 2, he had 17 points on 8-of-21 shooting and the Rockets lost by four.

Houston can look optimistically at that trend. “We knew we weren’t going to hold him to six points twice, or even another time the whole series,” Perkins said.

“If we keep focusing on him, that puts pressure on other people. We’re not scared that he’s going to get off. He’s gotten off before. Either way, we feel confident.”

If the Sonics make any adjustments, they will be only fine-tuning - changing the angles of their double-teams and the identities of the doublers. They will not abandon the whole idea of double-teaming. The tactic puts pressure on Olajuwon or his teammates to produce.

The key to the whole approach, as Olajuwon keeps saying, is the quickness of Seattle’s double-teams, anyway.

“We’re not going to let up,” Sonics swingman Nate McMillan said. “If you’re playing Chicago, you’re not going to pull off the double teams just to give Michael Jordan a chance. We’re not giving Olajuwon any opportunities. We can’t afford to.”

The Sonics are so confident in the way their schemes are working, they feel almost as if their focus and aggressiveness in executing them will be enough.

Monday night, the Rockets set up Olajuwon a little off the blocks and gave him the ball on the wings more often. Those adjustments paid off some. Perhaps they will devise more.

“They can, but I don’t know what else they can do,” Perkins said. “Against this defense, it’s going to be tough.”

There has been speculation, particularly after Game 1, that Olajuwon was tired, that the tendinitis in his knees and the pain in his lower back sapped his strength and desire. He denied all that, saying he has to divert the attention from himself to counter the Sonics’ tactics.

McMillan agrees.

“That’s why Olajuwon’s playing the way he’s playing,” he said. “If he shoots over the double-teams, he’s forcing things. To play team ball, you have to pass the ball around.”

The Sonics count on nothing. The Rockets last year lost the first two games of their conference semifinal against Phoenix. They even were down 3-1 and still came back from the brink of extinction.

The Rockets are not nearly there with Seattle.

“We’re not even close to being overconfident,” McMillan said. “We have a great deal of respect for them. They’re the defending champions.”