Unguarded

by Lenny Wilkens

  I didn’t dwell on it; I had already recognized that the combination of my not being a self-promoter along with coaching in a distant market such as Seattle meant I wouldn’t get much national recognition. Is it fair? Of course not, but who ever said life was fair? You take what comes, and you move on or you drive yourself crazy worrying about things you can’t control. I learned that very early in my coaching career. It’s also part of my faith in God. I have to believe that He is in control, that everything will work out according to His will. Over the years, I’ve learned to trust God, and that has helped me handle things as a coach.

  A coach can’t take a poor team and turn it into a great one. But a coach can have an impact on the game. The fans see the obvious: They know when a coach calls a time out, when a coach makes a substitution, or when a coach changes the lineup. But there is much more to it than that, especially for me in those days with the Sonics.

  We had no superstar. Jack Sikma, Dennis Johnson, and Gus Williams were all very good players, but there’s no Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, or Michael Jordan among them. None of those players could individually dominate game after game and win it for us.

  When I took over the Sonics, I asked the players to consider not just their own strengths and weaknesses, but the strengths and weaknesses of everyone else on the team.

  For example, Fred Brown was a great outside shooter. Maybe as good as anyone in the NBA back then. I told the players, “When Fred comes into the game, I want him shooting the ball. Not taking bad shots, but if he’s open, no hesitation, get him the ball.”

  And I told Fred that if his teammates were going to look for him to score, it was up to him to keep moving, to get himself free of the defense so he had an open shot.

  “If Fred takes a couple of bad shots, don’t get uptight,” I told the players. “I’ll handle it.”

  And there were times when Fred turned into “Downtown” Brown, his nickname because he loved to shoot the ball from so far away. And sometimes, “Downtown” got a little carried away. The players understood that. They also knew that Brown was sacrificing by coming off the bench, rather than making a big stink about not starting. They respected him for that, so they gave him some freedom when it came to shot selection.

  But I also told some of our players, “Look, when Fred goes off and starts forcing shots, don’t yell at him. Just quietly say, ’Hey, Fred, give me a look, I’m open.’ That’s all, say it once. He’ll hear, even if it looks as if he’s not listening.”

  Fred’s personality was such that getting screamed at just made the problem worse. A quiet approach worked better.

  For Jack Sikma, there were certain spots where he liked to set up near the basket. When he established that position, throw him the ball. Don’t hesitate, give him the ball!

  Over and over, I urged our players to learn each other’s games, their tendencies. If Paul Silas is open at the top of the key, you don’t have to pass him the ball and expect him to shoot it; Silas is not an outside threat. But if it’s Fred Brown open at the same spot, give him the ball—now!

  This may seem obvious, but realize that most people—not just basketball players—worry about themselves first. They don’t always think about what’s best for the other guy. It’s human nature for most of us to look out for number one, right? But that’s not the best way to play basketball.

  Before the 1978-79 season opened, I called the team together and said, “We don’t have to love each other. It would look stupid if all twelve of us walked down the street, holding hands.”

  That drew a laugh.

  “But we do have to respect each other,” I said.” We have to play together. We have to learn from each other. I realize that certain guys will hang out together away from the court, and some other guys will go their own way. That’s OK. We can’t all be together all the time. But we have to be a family when we’re at the gym. It’s us against everyone else. When a teammate makes a suggestion to you, take it the right way. He’s not trying to insult you, he’s saying something to make the team better. And when you go to say something to a teammate, say it the right way. Don’t insult the guy. Treat each other with respect.”

  I talked about how we went from a bunch of individuals with a 5-17 record to a true team that went to the seventh game of the NBA Finals. But I said we had to trust each other and sacrifice even a little more. We came so close, yes, so close to winning. Just a little more teamwork, that’s what we needed.

  The guys sat there, taking it in. You know how things get very quiet when a message is hitting home? How it gets so quiet, you can hear yourself breathe? That’s how it was when I spoke to the team that day.

  “There is only one ball,” I said. “Each of us does something a little different with it. Some of us are better at shooting it, some at rebounding, some at driving on the fast break and some at defending, taking it away from the other team. The way we win is to get the ball to the guy with the hot hand, the guy who can do the most with it right now. That guy often changes from game to game, even quarter to quarter. We have to be unselfish enough to keep finding that guy.”

  Players working together is more than coach-speak, and the coach can’t do everything. Early in our playoff series against Washington, Elvin Hayes was just pounding on Jack Sikma. Hayes knew Jack was a rookie and didn’t know how to retaliate to all the elbows and shoves, at least not without being called for a foul. Paul Silas was watching this from the bench. He knew that Hayes was trying to physically intimidate Sikma, and he knew that Sikma lacked the experience to battle back. He also knew that if someone didn’t challenge Hayes, Sikma was in big trouble. When Silas went into the game, Hayes leaned on him—and Silas nailed him in the chest with a right forearm. It happened so fast, no one saw it. But something happened, because suddenly, Hayes was staggering a bit under the basket. Hayes tried to shove Paul away from another rebound… and BAM!… Silas drilled him with another forearm. The officials never saw it, because Silas was too savvy to get caught. I didn’t tell Silas to do this. He saw it on his own. And he took care of Hayes, who then backed off Sikma a bit.

  This is part of what a coach means by chemistry. It’s the players looking out for each other. It’s veteran players spotting a young player who’s spending too much time on the town, taking the kid aside, and explaining, “Hey, man, you gotta get your rest or you’ll never last in this league.” Young players want the respect of the veterans, and they’re more likely to listen to a veteran player than they are to some coaches. That’s just a fact. It comes down to peer pressure, and when it’s used the right way, it’s the best thing for any team. For a couple of years in Seattle, we had that.

  In the summer of 1978, we lost Marvin Webster to New York via free agency. That meant we had to find some more size to help Sikma under the basket. There was still compensation for losing a free agent, either by agreement between the teams or by the decision of an arbitrator. In this case, the arbitrator said we could pick one of two New York players—Lonnie Shelton or Bob McAdoo.

  McAdoo was the bigger name, but he was approaching the end of his career. He also was more of a scorer, and we already had an inside player who could score in Sikma. I needed the defensive presence that I’d lost in Webster, so that’s why I went for Shelton, a burly, six-foot-eight, 270-pound forward. He was much like a grizzly bear, because he could be mean and strong, but he also was surprisingly quick and agile. I had always liked his game, dating back to when he played college ball at Oregon State. This deals with chemistry. In the eyes of most fans, McAdoo was the better player, but Shelton was the better player for us. If we had lost Sikma and kept Webster, then maybe I’d have picked McAdoo for his offense. Shelton was also a very unselfish player;he could score inside, but he liked to set up his teammates. A reporter once said, “Lonnie Shelton is wide enough to set a pick on the sun.” That was so true. The guy was huge. A guard could run his man into a Lonnie Shelton pick, and the guy would get wiped out. Lonnie’s body would just engulf him.

&
nbsp; I also picked up Dennis Awtrey, a veteran backup center, along with Dick Snyder, a veteran guard, and Wally Walker, a veteran forward. I knew we needed experience on the bench if we were going to win the title, and these guys would be content to play any role that I asked of them, especially if they knew they had a real chance at a championship ring.

  As we went through training camp, I liked the looks of our team. Sikma was our center, and was no longer a rookie. He’d averaged over 15 points and 12 rebounds that first season. His confidence had grown, and he also understood the kind of conditioning and strength needed to survive an 82-game regular season schedule and another 20-some games in the playoffs. I originally had Tom LeGarde in my starting lineup, but he was injured.

  I put Shelton in the lineup as a power forward, with John Johnson coming back as small forward, or point forward. J.J. was happy to handle the ball, to make sure that our guards, Gus Williams and Dennis Johnson, could use their speed to run down the court on the fast break.

  On the bench were Silas, Dick Snyder, Dennis Awtrey, Wally Walker, and Fred Brown.

  Expectations were high, at least in Seattle. Our fans were picking us to at least win the Western Conference and return to the NBA Finals. We couldn’t sneak up on people, as we had the year before. I felt quite a bit of pressure because this was the first team that I ever coached that was supposed to win big.

  I knew we were a good team, but not a classic basketball team. We had no prototype point guard. Both of our guards were scorers. The small forward is supposed to be an offensive position supplying 15 to 20 points a game, but we needed our small forward (John Johnson) to run the offense, like a point guard. After we lost Marvin Webster, we also lost our shot blocker. Sikma had played power forward next to Webster, now he was taking over at center for Webster. While Jack was a solid rebounder, he was neither a leaper nor a shot blocker. No one was going to take a look at Sikma and think, “I’m not driving down the lane on that guy.” This is not to knock Jack, it’s just to put his game into the perspective of the rest of the team. That’s why Shelton was such a critical pickup: He didn’t block a lot of shots, but he blocked the path to the basket. He put his enormous body in the middle of the lane, and he wasn’t afraid to knock a guy down who thought he could dunk on us. Silas gave us that same kind of presence when he came off the bench. For us to win a championship, every piece had to fit just right. Every player had to buy into a system that accented his strengths and covered his weaknesses. And more important, the players had to cover up for each other. A lot of players say they’re willing to do this, but they don’t carry it out. They start worrying about their scoring average, and how they need good statistics for the next contract.

  This team understood all that. If there was a mismatch, say Sikma was being covered by a guard, right away, we passed the ball to Sikma. This team recognized mismatches and continually made them work to our advantage. It played tremendous team defense, each player not just guarding his own man, but making sure that the defense was like a glove—all five fingers were covered. To coach a bunch of guys who were willing to put their egos aside and play together the way this group did in that 1978-79 season was a pleasure. I believed in those guys, and they believed in each other. I don’t care if that sounds corny, that’s at the heart of any winning team. The guys believe in something bigger and more important than themselves.

  There is also a very strange element to the story of this season, and only a few people know about it.

  During the 1977-78 season, there was this lady who occasionally left messages for me. She claimed to be a clairvoyant, and she said she had visions. I never bought into any of that stuff, so I ignored it. But it turned out that she was a friend of my brother’s wife. She kept telling my sister-in-law that she needed to see me, that she had something important to tell me. My sister-in-law kept bugging me about it, saying this lady was special.

  Finally, I agreed to let her come to our home. Marilyn and her parents were also there. The lady asked to see me in another room. We went to my den. She held both of my hands and began to speak in tongues. I wasn’t real comfortable with this, but I was trying to be gracious. During part of it, my father-in-law walked by, shook his head, and obviously thought the entire thing was crazy.

  Finally, she said, “I’ve wanted to talk with you for some time because I’ve seen things. I knew that last year would be good for you and the team, but this year is special. You will win a championship.”

  I said I hoped she was right, still not sure what to make of it.

  She said she wanted nothing from me. She said she prayed for me and my family, and just asked that I occasionally pray for her.

  That was fine with me. I didn’t think a lot about it for quite a while.

  The season began and we got off to a good start. Then Shelton and Brown were hurt, and we lost some games.

  The lady called and asked me to stop by her house, that she had a vision. I went to her house, which was in the projects. She had candles everywhere, and started praying, speaking in tongues.

  Then she said, “One of your players is hurt right now.”

  That wasn’t exactly something visionary, because it had been in the newspaper, the injuries to Shelton and Brown.

  “But one of your players is hurting now because he just changed to a different pair of shoes,” she said.

  I tried to think who that could be. Brown had an ankle injury, but I didn’t know that he had done anything to his shoes.

  “Go to that player,” she said. “Tell him to put a lift in his new shoes, and he’ll be back right after. Right now, he’s favoring his leg.”

  I thanked her for the words, and left.

  The next day at practice, I saw our trainer and said, “Did Fred change his shoes recently?”

  “Yeah, he got new ones,” he said.

  “Did you take the lift out of his old shoes and put them in the new ones?” I asked.

  “Fred said he didn’t need the lift anymore,” he said.

  “Put it in anyway,” I said.

  The trainer put the lifts in the shoes. Our next game was against Denver. At first, Fred said he wasn’t going to play, his ankle was still bothering him. Then he said he’d like to try it for a few minutes. He came off the bench, hit two or three quick shots. He only played about ten minutes that night, but by the next day, he said his ankle felt much better. We kept the lifts in those shoes, and he didn’t have any more problems for the rest of the year.

  The really weird thing is that I only heard from the lady one other time. It was a few years later. She told me, “I see a tire in your future. Yes, a tire. Rubber. That kind of thing.”

  I was still coaching in Seattle, so that made no sense to me.

  But I remembered what she said a few years later, when I was coaching the Cavaliers … and living in Akron, which was once known as the Rubber City because so many great tire companies were located there.

  We finished the regular season with a 52-30 record, good for first place in the Pacific Division.

  Even though we’d made it to the Finals in 1978, then won the Pacific Division the following season, most “experts” didn’t consider us serious contenders for the championship. They thought our success was a fluke.

  As Sports Illustrated wrote, “When the Washington Bullets beat Seattle in the seventh game of the championship series, many felt justice had been served, that the Sonics were merely a group of average players who had rallied around their monster center, Marvin Webster, and happened to hit a hot spell at just the right time. Surely, after the team lost Webster, the Sonics would return to journeymanhood and the franchise would just disappear under one of Seattle’s floating bridges.”

  That seemed especially true after Webster went to New York and we replaced him with Shelton—whose claim to fame in New York had been leading the league in personal fouls during his first two seasons.

  But Sports Illustrated eventually figured out what we knew all along—we were a team in the
best sense of the word. No one player “made us,” or as SI wrote, “Marvin Webster didn’t make the Sonics, they made him. Winning all those games and advancing through all those rounds of playoffs built trust and respect and a mutual confidence that one man’s leave-taking could not erase—even if the man was the Human Eraser himself.”

  Our team was special. No one averaged 20 points a game, but seven guys scored at least 11 points a night. We also led the league in defense and—I believe—floor burns as we came up with so many loose balls.

  Gus Williams was happy-go-lucky, and because he had such enthusiasm, such an engaging smile and love of the game, he could get away with taking some bad shots. His teammates respected Gus for how he flew up and down the court, sometimes becoming a oneman fast break. He had a knack for stealing the ball, for scoring lots of points in a hurry. But most of all, he was just so upbeat, so happy just to be playing basketball, that it rubbed off on the rest of the team.

  Dennis Johnson was far more serious. He was a tremendous defensive player. When we needed to shut down a hot-shooting guard, Dennis put out the fire. He smothered the guy, and he liked doing that, taking on the other team’s best scorer. And Dennis could score, too. He could be moody at times, wanting to be respected and worrying that he didn’t receive the credit he was due. During the championship season, some of that anger worked for the good of the team, because Dennis was out to prove that he was a great player. Every game was a personal challenge to him, a chance to show everyone that he was an outstanding player.

  Silas was a tough guy on the court. He’d knock you down to get a rebound. If the game got rough, he’d knock a guy’s block off. But he was a very friendly man, and a tremendously unselfish player who came off the bench for us to rebound and set picks.