I called a team meeting in Boston and explained the lineup changes. Watts and Brown were going to come off the bench. Dennis Johnson and Gus Williams were going to start in the backcourt. I could see that Watts was hurt by this, but there wasn’t much I could do: He simply wasn’t good enough to start. To Fred Brown, I explained the sixth-man role that I envisioned for him, how he could come off the bench shooting, instant offense. Fred wasn’t completely sold on the idea, but he was very receptive and willing to give it a try if I was convinced it would help the team.
I then told Silas and Seals, our forwards, that I wanted them to come off the bench. I would start John Johnson and Jack Sikma.
The players bought into the changes because they had been losing so much and were tired of being told they were terrible. Everyone was telling them that they were the worst team in the league. I came into the job very upbeat, saying they could win; all it would take was some adjustments, and the losing had made them very open to suggestions.
I wanted a team that stressed quickness and defense.
I knew with Williams and Dennis Johnson in the backcourt, we could really run. And they’d defend the opposing guards, play the kind of pressure, man-to-man defense where they nearly crawled right inside the other player’s shirt.
But Dennis Johnson and Gus Williams both liked to shoot the ball. Neither was a natural point guard, and if I asked them to radically change their games and pass a lot more, that would take away from their strengths. I needed someone else to set up the offense and pass, and that someone was John Johnson. Former Milwaukee coach Don Nelson talked a lot about his “point forward” concept in the 1980s with Paul Pressey, but we did it with John Johnson in 1977. J.J. loved to pass. He was the ultimate team man. Dennis Johnson and Gus Williams could just take off down the court for a fast break, and J.J. could dribble the ball up and set up the offense if we couldn’t get the break working. J.J. took the pressure of having to handle the ball off our guards, which made them more effective.
The Sonics had a lot of good pieces; I just had to put them in the right places and make sure everything fit together.
I knew Webster would rebound and block shots. I believed in Sikma and knew that he just needed playing time to become a real inside scoring threat.
When I looked down my bench, I saw Fred Brown, Paul Silas, Slick Watts, and Bruce Seals. That was pretty decent depth, because we wouldn’t lose much when they came into the game. Also, Silas and Brown—who still could start for several teams—would be matched up against bench guys when they came into the game, and how many teams had reserves who could guard Silas or Brown? Most coaches just want to keep the score where it is when they substitute; I wanted to create the kind of bench strength that enabled us to pick up ground when we went to the bench. That’s why I often keep a player capable of starting as a sixth man, just to make the bench better. I want a guy who can come into a game and make an immediate impact, a real splash—not just have us tread water.
At this point in my career, I also felt more confident in myself as a coach. It was a relief not to have to play, too, just to coach the team. That helped. I had a lot of faith in my vision of what a team could be, a faith that was reinforced when Portland won the championship just a year after they let me go. I could see how those Blazers were developing and what they had to do: I’d told them to trade Sidney Wicks, and they did, picking up Maurice Lucas. I pushed for Portland to trade for Dave Twardzik. I drafted Bobby Gross and Lionel Hollins, then played them as rookies so they’d get experience. The key was that Walton finally was healthy. That they won a championship after I’d left confirmed in my mind that I had the team on the right track. I recognized the kind of players needed to win, and that experience in Portland was paying off for me in Seattle.
We won our game in Boston by 28 points. The Celtics were having a down year, but how many times did any team win a game in Boston Garden by 28 points? The next stop was Buffalo, and we won there, too. So we came home on a three-game winning streak, and then beat Atlanta in front of our fans. That was a huge game in my mind, because we needed to get the fans back behind us. We had to win that game, and when we did, our home-court advantage returned.
We won six more in a row, stretching that streak to ten straight.
It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened. The atmosphere was negative, hopeless, before I took over. The guys knew that I really did believe in them, because I was the one who had acquired them. It wasn’t as if I was some coach who came in from the outside and was saddled with all these players. Furthermore, the guys knew me as a former player. I had been out of the league for only two years, so I either played with or against most of them. I was only thirty-nine and still in good shape, and some days, I’d scrimmage with them. They could see I still had some of my game left. I understood what it took to play in the league, and the guys knew and appreciated that. You don’t have to be a former player to be a good coach, but it helps. It gives you immediate credibility with the players. You have respect, and then it’s up to you to make sure you don’t lose it. A coach who never played in the league has to prove to his players that he knows what he’s doing. They watch every move he makes and bear down on every word he says. He receives far more scrutiny than a former player, at least in the beginning of his coaching career. Then, if the coach shows he can win, the players will back him.
Another advantage I had was that I’d played and coached in Seattle. This was home for me. The fans quickly embraced me, because they knew me. They didn’t know Bob Hopkins. I admit, playing in the NBA came relatively easy to me. I didn’t have to work at seeing the entire floor, or finding the open man; it just came naturally. So did understanding different offensive and defensive schemes. It wasn’t difficult for me to visualize those Xs and Os on the blackboard and translate that into what it meant on the court. This was an asset to me when I coached. As a player, I was a point guard, so I viewed the game not just from my perspective, but for what was best for the entire team. The coach does the same thing. It also never hurts to have some immediate success. Players are far more willing to sacrifice, to come off the bench, when they look up at the scoreboard at the end of the game and see that it paid off with a victory. Once most players taste winning, it just makes them want more and more. They hunger for it. They make even more of a commitment to a system that’s working. Suddenly, I sounded like a prophet. I said we could be a good team, and we win 10 in a row. That made them pay attention to the other things I wanted them to do.
Except for Slick Watts.
Slick was a colorful character in Seattle, a little guard with a shaved head and an electric smile. He wore different headbands each night. He was the one Seattle player during the Russell Era who made tons of public appearances. He signed thousands of autographs. He loved the fans, and they embraced him. Some fans even wore headbands to the game, just like Slick. But Slick was only our fourth-best guard, behind Dennis Johnson, Williams, and Brown. And that meant his playing time was being slashed.
In the middle of our winning streak, he came to me and said, “Coach, I need more time.”
“Slick, we’re winning,” I said. “I like our guard rotation right now.”
“But Coach,” he said, “my public needs to see me play.”
“Slick, if we lose, the public isn’t going to want to see any of us,” I said. “Right now, we’re winning. It doesn’t make any sense to change. Any time you feel it’s too much for you and you want to be traded, come to me and I’ll do what I can. Or come, and we’ll just talk about things.”
Slick was OK for a few days, but then it began to really eat away at him. His ego took a beating, because it wasn’t just that I had benched him—he also saw that the players in front of him were better.
In practices, he began to sulk a bit. His playing time became even shorter. He discovered that while the fans still liked him, they were adopting some of our new players as their favorites. That happens when a team starts to win: The fans gravit
ate to whoever is playing well and make those players their heroes. This really bothered Slick.
Then he came to me and asked for a trade. He assumed I could work something out within a few days.
It took a while. Slick’s estimation of his own ability didn’t match that of the other general managers. There just wasn’t much of a market for a six-foot-one guard who played with a lot of enthusiasm, but shot only 42 percent from the field, 60 percent at the foul line, and didn’t always make the wisest decisions when handling the ball.
Slick took his frustration to the media, saying, “I’ve been letting Coach Wilkens handle getting me out of here, but if something doesn’t happen pretty soon, I’m going to have to take it over myself.”
I read that and didn’t know if I should laugh or take an aspirin.
Just how was Slick going to “take it over myself”? The poor guy’s ego would have been smashed if he had heard what other general managers were saying about him. Slick thought he was a terrific player, a starter. Most teams saw him as I did—a fourth guard on a winning team. I sensed that Slick wanted to use his popularity with the fans to put pressure on me to make a trade, but at this point, Slick was not the main concern for the fans. They had quickly embraced our team, because of the winning and the exciting style we played. Slick was learning the hard way that some fans have very short memories.
Finally, I was able to trade Slick to New Orleans for a first-round pick, and Slick was surprised to see that there wasn’t much of an outcry when he was traded. The fans just wished him well with his new team and went back to cheering for the Sonics who were on the floor.
Within two years, Slick Watts was out of the NBA at the age of twenty-eight.
We finished the year at 47-35, which tied for the franchise best (set in 1971-72, my last season the first time around).
But the real story was we had a 42-18 record after the coaching change.
When the playoffs began, no one gave us much chance of winning. I didn’t know if we’d make the Finals, but I was sure we’d play well. Every week, our team was getting better. We opened against the Lakers and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and we upset them. Marvin Webster had a tremendous series against Kareem, contesting that famed hook shot and just being a bear on the boards and blocking shots. In the deciding game, Sikma had 24 points, and Webster snared 18 rebounds.
In the next round we faced Portland, my old team. They were the defending champions and had a 58-24 record, best in the NBA that season. But as I was to later learn, it’s very, very hard to play at the top level the year after you’ve won a title. We simply had more desire to win, more sense of a mission, than Portland. We upset them, too, winning the series in six games. I’m not one to gloat: What happened to Portland that season is the same thing that happened to me when I coached there. Walton was hurting again, in and out of the lineup. You never knew what you’d get from him or some of the other guys from one night to the next. Jack Ramsay was an outstanding coach, but none of us are good enough coaches to overcome serious injuries to key players. But I was thrilled when Sikma made the winning shot in Game Six to ice the series. I was proud of him, because Maurice Lucas had been just pounding on Sikma, but our rookie held his own. Sikma averaged 10 points and 8.3 rebounds during the regular season, and that went up to 14 points and 8.1 rebounds in the playoffs. So much for a kid from a small school not being able to play in big games, as some of his critics said when we drafted him.
The Portland series brought some national attention to us. Sports Illustrated wrote, “Was Seattle’s Lenny Wilkens some kind of a) miracle worker b) faith healer c) just plain lucky?”
Actually, we were d) a very good team that no one knew about.
In the Western Conference Finals, we knocked off Denver in six games. Fred Brown came off the bench to score 26 points in that Game Six to clinch it.
Sports Illustrated described Brown as “an elderly, bent-over codger with a goatee who enters stage left and hurls the ball from the unlikeliest places—Puget Sound, Mount Rainier, you name it.”
Or as Denver coach Larry Brown said of Fred, “We handcheck him, we body him, we double up on him in the corner and he still gets away. Sometimes, he throws it up without looking, and the ball still goes down. They all go down, but that’s his nickname, right?”
Yes, it was: “Downtown” Fred Brown, and our fans about blew the roof off when he came into the game. In fact, our fans were crazy about the entire team. Sports Illustrated called it “Sonicsteria,” the magazine adding, “the good people of Seattle blow their lungs out over a team they call the bionic Sonics.”
Dennis Johnson was “a stocky child who refers to himself as ’the black kid with freckles and bags under his eyes,’ and he puts the defensive clamps on the opposition’s hero.”
We moved into the Finals against Washington—and discovered a problem: The Seattle Coliseum was booked for other events. The last thing anyone expected was for us to make the Finals. We had to move our home games to the huge Kingdome, which took away some of the home-court advantage we had developed with our sellouts of thirteen thousand fans right on top of the opposition. We took the Series to seven games, but in the end, Washington had too much experience for us with Wes Unseld, Elvin Hayes, Bob Dandridge, and Kevin Grevey.
But to take a Seattle team to the Finals in a season where we started 5-17, that told me that the next year would be even better. Most of our team was young; they had grown together, learned to trust each other and to have confidence in the coaching staff. If we were ever going to win a championship, I knew it could happen the following season.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I KNEW WE COULD WIN THE NBA TITLE in 1979. We had done so much in so little time the previous season that I knew, just knew, that we could get back to the Finals—and this time, we would win.
So why was I depressed immediately after we lost in the 1978 Finals?
Because it came down to the seventh game, a couple of key plays, a couple of crucial toots of the whistle. So close. And even more than my players, I knew how hard it was just to reach the Finals. In my fifteen years as an NBA player, I had gotten there only once—in my rookie year with the Hawks. It takes some luck, even when you’ve got a team that’s coming together the way the Sonics were. The chemistry was there. The key players stayed relatively healthy. Just about everything was in place. And we still fell just short.
There was a critical play near the end of the seventh game. We had made a gutsy comeback to cut Washington’s lead to four points. There was a loose ball on the floor. I mean, it rolled right past three of our guys. Washington’s Mitch Kupchak picked it up, laid it in the basket—and was fouled. That four-point lead went to seven, and it was like someone punched us in the stomach. All the air came out of us. The final score was 105-99.
When the Finals were over, I actually had dreams about that play. I saw it as if it were happening all over again, saw it in slow motion. I found myself thinking, “If only we had picked that ball up…”
I also was utterly exhausted. I never realized how physically and mentally draining it is when your team goes all the way to the final game, the final quarter, the final few minutes… when a championship is so close, you can almost see the banner hanging from the ceiling… and you lose.
It feels as if you’ve left every drop of blood on the arena floor. When two teams have a series like we did with Washington, and it comes down to a final game, the team that has the better night wins. That sounds obvious, but think about it for a moment: You start training camp at the end of September. You play into the month of June. That’s over 100 games, over 150 practices. That’s nine months of injuries, agonies, and controversies that are a part of any season, even a great one. Then it comes down to who has the best night?
Yes, one night.
And Washington had the better night.
In some ways, that’s hard to accept.
Yes, everyone was very gracious and upbeat after the season. Over and over, people were so
excited that we had simply made it to the playoffs, that we came back from the basketball dead after that 5-17 start. Logically, I felt the same way. But emotionally, part of me wondered if we would ever get that chance again, if we could ever come so close to a championship again. So much had to go right for us to reach the Finals, and so much can go wrong in any given season.
I didn’t feel as if my best friend had died, but there was this sense of a deep personal loss after that last game. Once training camp starts, there never is a day off, never a day when a coach doesn’t have to do something—watch videotape, make telephone calls to other teams and scouts, prepare for the next practice or game. But after you lose that last game… Bam!…it’s over. It’s like you hit a wall. Suddenly, there are no more games, no more practices. It seems like your life shifts from going a million miles an hour…to… nothing. Everything just stops. You feel like you should be getting ready for another game, but there are no more games. When that sets in, you’re drained. Right after the playoffs, there were days when I didn’t get out of bed until 10:00 A.M.—for me, that’s sleeping very late. Despite working what amounts to an afternoon shift, I tend to get up around 7:00 or 8:00 A.M. After a week, I was back to normal.
But I also was disappointed that I received so little consideration for the NBA Coach of the Year, an award that I never won until 1994. If there ever was a season when the voting should have gone my way, it was 1977-78. I know that the NBA writers have to vote before the playoffs, so perhaps I might have won if they could have voted later, after the Finals. About the only support I received was from the Seattle writers. Atlanta’s Hubie Brown was voted the award. His Hawks had a 41-41 record, up from 31-51 the previous season. Hubie did a good job, but I didn’t think it was that much better than what we accomplished in Seattle. Furthermore, since I acquired most of the players on that team, I also could have received some serious consideration for that as part of the Coach of the Year award, or even for Executive of the Year, but that didn’t happen either.
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