By Frank Hughes
The News Tribune
SAN ANTONIO – The day before the Seattle SuperSonics played the San Antonio Spurs in the deciding Game 5 of their playoff series, power forward Vin Baker said that his team wasn’t going to come out like former heavyweight champion Hasim Rahman.
Instead, the Sonics came out more like Michael Spinks.
Setting record lows for scoring deficiency, the Sonics were knocked out of this playoff almost before it got started, eventually dropping a 101-78 decision before 23,369 in the Alamodome Friday night that sent them sputtering into the off-season.
Some of the Sonics’ misery had to do with return of Tim Duncan, who missed Game 4 after his father died of cancer on Monday. Duncan returned from St. Croix, Virgin Islands, on Thursday night.
But this loss had more to do with a Sonics team that talked a big game but failed to show up, crafting one of the worst deciding-game efforts in memory.
Almost to a man, the Sonics said if they couldn’t get up for a Game 5 then something is wrong. Then they went out and scored only 10 points in the first quarter, a franchise low, and 26 points in the first half, another franchise low.
Clearly, something was wrong.
“The way we look at it, we didn’t play our best game,” said Sonics coach Nate McMillan, whose team’s average margin in the three losses was 23.7 points.
“Tonight was not our best effort, and that was disappointing. You don’t want to end the season without your best effort.”
But it wasn’t even that the Sonics couldn’t score, because there are many examples of shots not going in. It was also the way they allowed the Spurs to run away with the game.
One of the maxims in basketball is that rebounding is about effort. In the first quarter alone, Spurs forward Malik Rose outrebounded the entire Sonics team, 9-6.
Seattle missed 16 shots in the first quarter and got zero offensive rebounds. San Antonio had 15 misfires and collected seven offensive rebounds.
Baker was the biggest culprit, with no rebounds in the first half. Baker ended the game with two rebounds in 29 minutes. Overall, the Spurs outrebounded the Sonics, 53-28.
“Rebounding has been a problem for us all season long,” McMillan said. “None of our big (men) had a rebound. Our guards … were the leading rebounders and our three forwards and centers had zero boards. If you can’t rebound the ball, you definitely can’t win big games like this.”
But Baker wasn’t the whole problem because his teammates were equally culpable. Jerome James played four minutes and was so ineffective that he never got back into the game. Desmond Mason missed all five of his shots in the first half, going 9-for-13 overall. Brent Barry continued to look lost when the game mattered, then heated up in the second half, after it was decided.
When David Robinson showed up at the morning shootaround and shot around, there was speculation all day that he might play for the first time since he strained his back in Game 1.
He didn’t play, not that anybody noticed. San Antonio jumped to an 11-2 lead before the Sonics called timeout, and everybody realized that it was the same score of Game 3, when Seattle took an 11-2 lead only to watch develop into a Spurs rout.
A similar turnaround wasn’t reproduced by the Sonics. Not even close. Baker scored the Sonics’ second basket with 6:28 left in the quarter, and the next field goal was not scored until three minutes later, by which time San Antonio held a 17-6 lead.
“I figured it was going to be a long night when we got down 11-2,” Mason said. “You figure in a playoff situation, a Game 5, you can’t get down like that. And we did.”
Despite difficult circumstances, Duncan continued his awesome performances in this series, certifying the crowd’s chants of “MVP.” Duncan had 23 points, nine rebounds and seven blocks, making any thoughts the Sonics might have had a distant dream.
This affair was so bad that with more than seven minutes left in the game, the chants of MVP turned to “Beat LA, Beat LA.” whom the Spurs will face in the second round beginning Sunday afternoon.
The Sonics, meanwhile, head home to Seattle before they scatter across the country to their postseason homes with a long summer’s worth of bad memories about an effort that will not soon be forgotten.
“It’s too bad Game 5 wasn’t as competitive as all the other (playoff) series have been,” Barry said. “It seemed like we were in a slap fight instead of coming together and throwing punches.
“Our performances in all three losses takes away some of the things we did this year. But it also gives us motivation to work on some things in the off-season.”
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