The new motto and propaganda focus coming from the Sonics these days is a return to the past theme. I frankly would rather leave the Sonics past buried, but since Howard Schultz (the Sonics majority owner) opened the Pandora’s box ... I might as well explore it.

The Sonics have a long and storied history dating back to 1967 inaugural season, but for today I want to explore what may be the most pertinent bit of history for today’s Supersonics ... the recent past, because many of the same participants (players, management, coaches) are still involved.

From the start of the 92-93 season until the playoffs of the 97-98 season, the Sonics were a perennial championship contender. That’s a fact every Sonics fan knows. What makes those seasons un-gratifying and un-fulfilling is that the Sonics never won the championship. It took some time, but I and I think most fans, accepted the failures of players on the court that contributed to us never winning it all. What was harder to accept, but seemed abundantly clear after a few years of sulking and deep reflection, was that it was not the players that actually had the largest blame in the Sonics failing to win a championship because the Sonics roster was mostly a group of overachievers that had found a niche in Karl’s system. The reality was vital mistakes that ultimately cost the Sonics a championship were by management, and in this case I’m talking about Wally Walker and, to a lesser degree, George Karl.

When a team loses in the playoffs the first thing that any fan or NBA expert looks at is the what the players did wrong on the court and how they got beat, which makes sense, but after that initial response has ended a more analytical approach often reveals the truth. In this case the truth is that the Sonics issues had everything to do with the way they were coached and the type of team that was continually built.

The first major failure by the Sonics was the loss to Denver in the first round of the 1994 playoffs, and it was also the start of the Sonics management’s string of screwups. The Sonics were an amazing 63-19 in that season, and had everyone believing they could win it all ... even NBC. (And all Sonics fans know NBC hates the Supes ... wink ... wink) Yet we all know that in 1994 the players apparently choked on the court and lost to Denver because Shawn was scared to challenge Dikembe in the paint, GP got into a one on one battle with Abdul-Rauf, and Ricky Pierce failed to step up as the famed “Big Paper Daddy”. All of those things helped to add up to a loss, but the fact that people often forget is that Denver buried threes while we refused to abandon the famed “Sonic trap”.

Now in most cases individual player performances are not the responsibility of a coach or even something to consider blaming on a coach, but when three major players on a team fail to play up to their potential, you start to wonder if the coach prepped his players properly. What makes Karl’s coaching failures in 1994 clear and blatant was his failure to adjust and play without the trap, if only for one series. What was later discovered of course is that Karl, at that point, didn’t have a good half court offense installed with the Sonics because as Karl later admitted, he hadn’t really developed one. Due to Karl’s shortsightedness the Sonics entered the playoffs in 1994 as a run and gun team off the break, with no solid backup half-court offense, except giving the ball to Ricky Pierce.

If that wasn’t bad enough look at what happened after the season ended. Within ten minutes of the game ending Gary Payton and Ricky Pierce were at each others throats and Karl was publicly (according to published reports) berating Shawn Kemp in the locker room for his lackluster performance against Mutombo. To compound the error of publicly berating a developing superstar, not a month later George Karl tried to trade Shawn Kemp for Scottie Pippen (Bob Whitsitt had already left) ... which of course was the first rift in the Sonics relationship with Shawn Kemp. All of these incidents alone mean nothing in particular, but together they add up to a failure of management. I won’t be so shortsighted that I blame management entirely for the 1994 debacle because of course the failure is partially the players' fault, but there is a large share of the blame to be doled out between George Karl, the departing "Trader" Bob Whitsitt, and Barry Ackerley for not reining the entire situation in.

Despite Karl’s somewhat legendary coaching ability in some Sonics circles, I could probably write a book on Karl’s bad coaching decisions with the Sonics, but I won’t. For today I will ignore Karl’s blatant coaching mistakes because they are not the biggest screwups to occur within the Sonics management during our supposed title run. The truly puzzling and moronic management decisions that killed the Sonics were the trades and signings that Wally Walker and George Karl orchestrated after Walker was hired in July of 1994.

The first screwup by the duo was the trade of Ricky Pierce and the just drafted Carlos Rogers for Sarunas Marcioulonis. Ricky had fought with GP, was often hurt, and had failed to come up big in the playoffs, yet Sarunas was certainly not the solution. Sarunas played in only ten more games than Pierce the next year, his scoring total per game was 5 points less, and in the playoffs he disappeared as much if not more than Ricky Pierce, and to do all of that we gave away Carlos Rogers, our first round draft pick. Carlos Rogers was supposed to be our backup center, but since we had traded him for virtually nothing, we signed Bill Cartwright and retained Steve Scheffler to backup our Ervin Johnson/Sam Perkins center combo.

After the ‘94-’95 campaign and the 4 game dismissal by the Lakers in the playoffs, which was once again riddled with bad coaching decisions by Karl, Walker decided a major change was in store.

As the season ended it was very obvious and abundantly clear through media leaks that George Karl and Kendall Gill were feuding openly. In the two-year player/coach relationship there had been numerous fights, benchings, and arguments at practices, and the popular belief was that one of them had to go for the sake of team unity. Walker had two options -- either trade Kendall Gill or fire George Karl (I would have preferred the latter even at that time). Walker picked the first. Kendall Gill had a few issues, but he was a young, athletic, tall, and a defensively gifted 2 guard. Hersey Hawkins was not untalented, but the fact is that Hawkins, because of his height, was simply not as defensively sound as Kendall Gill. At first glance the decision between Hawkins’ and his shortcomings and having someone who doesn’t get along with his coach may seem obvious, but in the Finals the Bulls victimized the Sonics by posting up Hawkins and taking advantage of his lack of height. Of course hindsight is 20/20, but when the trade was happening Wally had to know that Hawkins was adequate, but not at the same talent level as Gill. Thus by the Sonics essentially downgrading at the 2 guard, the Sonics set themselves up to get victimized by teams with big guards i.e. the Bulls. This mistake wasn’t huge or even glaring, but it does equal another bad move for Walker/Karl combo.

The real insanity of Wally and George’s management stint began that summer after the Finals. For some insane reason George had lost faith or had become upset with the play of his centers, and Wally agreed so the Sonics let Ervin Johnson and Frank Brickowski walk away in order to sign Jim McIlvaine. The McIlvaine signing may be the duo’s crowning achievement in screwups for a number of reasons. First of all they had made an unproven center the second highest paid player on the Sonics. That signing was dumb enough by itself, but then the Sonics compounded that error by not signing him to a 2 or 3 year contract, but instead to a 7-year contract (that the Nets recently decided to buy out rather than continue to pay Mac to be a bench player). Despite all of that, the real mistake was that by signing McIlvaine they had put the biggest tear as of yet in their already strained relationship with Shawn Kemp. Kemp was in no way a great businessman when it came to signing contracts, he always signed too early and for a lot less than he could have gotten if he had waited, yet the Sonics failed to deal with his resentment and instead allowed it to fester for the next 9 months leading to his eventual trade.

The only good thing the Sonics did that summer was re-sign GP to a 7 year 90 million contract, but on the same day they made another huge mistake by signing Craig Ehlo. Ehlo was a broken down tweener that was more famous for having a game winner dropped in his face than doing anything particularly great in the NBA. Ehlo turned out to be such a huge mistake that he was waived before the next season. This new team mix of a well paid superstar, a superstar being shortchanged, and an unproven center added up to an early second round exit, and the eventual trade demands of Shawn Kemp.

Shawn Kemp was in no way a saint, but he was an incredible 20-10 guy that played hard every night, and had a spectacular aerial and post game. To put the situation in perspective, at this point Shawn Kemp was being compared to a young Karl Malone, yet the Sonics continually slapped him in the face and made errors in their handling of him that can only be described as egregious. If it was not bad enough that Kemp was being paid less than an absolutely woeful center, right before the 97 playoffs a rumor was leaked that Shawn was an alcoholic. The rumor was later traced back to the overly media friendly George Karl. George has never admitted to starting the rumor, but the evidence is certainly there to safely assume that it was Karl. All of this meant that in the summer of 97 Shawn was feeling ostracized and insulted, and thus demanded a trade. Now in hindsight Shawn has admitted he should have been more patient and tried to work through his issues with the team, but he didn’t and he was traded in a three-way deal for Vin Baker.

Although in light of Baker’s recent performances that trade can be scoffed at and abhorred, at the time it looked like a great deal for the Sonics on paper. Baker, of course, had a good season with the Supes that year, before his game suddenly fell apart in the playoffs and until now had shown no signs of recovering. As much as I would like to, I can’t blame Walker for trading for Baker -- if Kemp was deadset on not coming back Vin was a great option on paper. The problem of course is that Vin Baker's first season was for all intensive purposes the Sonics last run at a championship, and it ended in the second round. More importantly it was the final year of the Walker/Karl duo. The only problem was that only Karl was fired instead of both he and Wally Walker, and for that I blame Ackerley for not canning them both.

Within this 4 year window of Sonic history Wally Walker (along with George Karl) made enough bad personnel decisions for a lifetime, yet Wally Walker’s career with the Sonics continues on. Schultz wants us to remember and embrace the Sonics history of past, but to me it looks like Schultz needs to embrace the reality that Walker is a lousy GM that shouldn’t be in charge of any team's personnel decisions, yet he remains.

Every bit of Sonics history in that 4-year window I talked about was absolutely true, but I will say all of it is open to interpretation. What bugs me is Howard Schultz's interpretation. As I said at the start, history is always a Pandora’s box that probably shouldn’t be opened, but if Schultz wants to look at the history of the Sonics as a whole and embrace it, then he needs to embrace the bad with the good. Quite frankly the bad is that Wally Walker is still around and he is quickly making a run at the title of the dumbest GM or exec in the NBA, a title currently held by Jerry Krause. Why Schultz made Walker a part owner and team president is beyond me, yet he did. Go figure. What makes all of Walker's mistakes during his tenure as GM worse is that he is still screwing up, and if he trades GP he’ll have done it again, but this time ten times worse.

Goat of the Week:
Most of you are probably thinking Walker will be my goat of the week, but completely to the contrary, my goat of the week is Howard Schultz. Walker may have made his unbelievable share of mistakes, but my goat is Schultz for keeping Walker around after he bought the team last year and then promoting him. Schultz says he is embracing history, but in my book he is conveniently rewriting the most important part of Sonics history ... the recent management’s past, which actually has an affect on today’s squad. They say if you don’t learn from history you're doomed to repeat it, which means we’re doomed to watch Walker repeat his mistakes of the past because Walker certainly hasn’t learned anything, and obviously neither has Schultz.

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