Opponent: Portland Trail Blazers

When: 7 p.m. Tuesday

Where: KeyArena, Seattle

TV: FSN (cable)

Radio: KJR (950 AM)

McMillan shaken by friend’s death

Returning home from a long road trip with the best record in the NBA should have been a happy occasion for Nate McMillan.

Instead, McMillan’s Wednesday homecoming was marred by the death the day before of good friend Mary McClinton of Everett. The 69-year-old woman died tragically 21/2 weeks after she mistakenly received an injection of a highly toxic antiseptic solution while undergoing surgery for a brain aneurysm at Seattle’s Virginia Mason Medical Center.

McMillan and McClinton became acquainted while working together to raise money for a youth basketball court and other programs at Everett’s Trinity Baptist Church. McMillan missed Saturday’s team practice to attend her funeral, and before Sunday’s game he remembered a woman he knew as “Mother McClinton.”

“She was a very good lady who worked hard to try to help people,” he said in voice touched with emotion. “She was one of the best people I’ve ever met. She was just a real good lady.”

McMillan knew McClinton was very ill when the Sonics left on Nov. 15 for a 10-day road trip to the East Coast and Midwest. On Sunday, he lamented that he had not been to see her before the team departed.

“Not that I could have done anything,” he said softly, “but in a situation like that you regret that you didn’t go by. … We were really pretty tight. To get that news on the road was tough.”

Making do: Counting injured players and those missing due to suspensions, the Pacers were without seven players from their regular rotation – guards Reggie Miller and Stephen Jackson, forwards Jermaine O’Neal, Ron Artest, Jonathan Bender and Jeff Foster, and center Scot Pollard – for Sunday’s game.

Indiana had nine players in uniform, which is actually better than the six and seven players they had for some recent games. Yet despite being short-handed, the Pacers arrived in Seattle with a three-game winning streak.

“It’s a challenge for us,” said Indiana coach Rick Carlisle, “but we’ve found out we have a lot of guys with a lot of pride. We just decided as a group that we’re not going to give in. It’s just simply not an option for us, for our fans or for our franchise. We just have to keep pushing forward and trying to win games.

“Right now, as cliched as it is, we have to go one day at a time. We’ve got some guys who have only been here three or four days. … We’re going to keep scrambling to try to find ways to put the ball in the basket and try to stop the other team. There is no other option for us.”

Asked if he was willing to suit up for practice, the 45-year-old Carlisle, a former NBA player, managed a wry grin. “We’re in trouble,” he said, “but we’re not in that much trouble.”

Add, Carlisle: Area basketball fans with good memories will recall that Carlisle spent the 2000-01 season as a color commentator on Sonics radio and TV broadcasts, working with longtime Seattle announcer Kevin Calabro.

The broadcasting gig came between a stint as a Pacers assistant coach and becoming head coach of the Detroit Pistons for the 2001-02 season.

“That was a great year for me to recharge and sort of step away from coaching,” Carlisle said. “On the other hand, when you become a broadcaster, particularly an analyst, the way you view the game becomes very much like how a head coach views the game. You have to see everything, you have to digest everything, and you have to be able, in a concise way, to relate what you see and how things are happening. So it was really a blessing for me to be in that situation. The opportunity to be a broadcaster really broadened my vision of the entire game and how everything sort of happens.”

Rich Myhre, Herald Writer