SEATTLE – Go ahead, make fun of the NBA’s Eastern Conference if you want. After all, only four of the circuit’s 15 teams have winning records.
Still, one team back east is doing quite well and it’s tonight’s opponent for the Seattle SuperSonics, the Indiana Pacers.
Under new coach Rick Carlisle, who has bounced back nicely after his unceremonious and wholly undeserved firing by Detroit last season, Indiana boasts a shiny 15-4 record. The Pacers, in fact, had a remarkable November, winning the first seven road games on their schedule. Indiana, which did not lose away from home until facing the Los Angeles Lakers and Portland in the last week, has an 8-2 road mark, the league’s best.
None of this is a coincidence, of course. Carlisle has the Pacers winning the old-fashioned way – with defense and rebounding. Indiana leads the NBA in scoring defense, giving up a mere 82.4 points a game, and is sixth in opponents’ field goal percentage at .414. In rebound percentage, which calculates a team’s percentage of the total possible rebounds, the Pacers are seventh at .510 (the Sonics, meanwhile, are last among 29 teams at .475).
All this means Seattle will face a formidable challenge tonight at KeyArena, and it begins with the formidable task of stopping 6-foot-11 forward Jermaine O’Neal, one of the game’s rising stars. O’Neal leads the Pacers in scoring (20.1 points per game), rebounds (10.5) and blocked shots (3.11), and he joins with 6-7 Ron Artest (18.3 points, 5.8 rebounds, 2.28 steals) to give Indiana one of the league’s best forward tandems.
O’Neal, said Seattle coach Nate McMillan, “is a very good player. He’s definitely one of the top (big men) in the league.”
The Sonics and Pacers have already tangled once this season and it was, for Seattle, a forgettable outing. On Nov. 14 the two teams played at Indiana’s Conseco Fieldhouse and the Pacers breezed to a 101-78 victory, an outcome that equals Seattle’s worst defeat of the season.
“They had just lost a game at home,” McMillan recalled, “and they had three days (of practice to prepare), and they came out with intensity and just got after us.”
Though his players feel good after consecutive wins against Houston and New York, that defeat “is still fresh in our minds,” he added. “We didn’t play well, and we didn’t play with that fire and that fight that we’ve played in the last couple of games.”
Despite their struggles at times this season, the Sonics will bring a 9-6 record into tonight’s clash. Considering the absence of guard Ray Allen, the team’s top scorer from a year ago who has yet to play after Nov. 1 ankle surgery, that would seem to be a decent mark.
Not exactly, McMillan said. Home losses to Atlanta, Miami and Memphis still rankle him, not to mention a 23-point thrashing by New Jersey at KeyArena 10 days ago. In fact, in a staff meeting just before the season, McMillan projected the Sonics winning 10 of their first 12 games, with possible wins against Minnesota and New Jersey in the other two.
His assistants, McMillan admitted with a smile, “looked at me like I was crazy.”
“So with us winning nine games, I felt like we could do that,” he said. “Am I happy with 9-6? No. I’ll take it, though.”
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