For a Brief Moment in Time, The Best Shooter in the NBA was a Seattle SuperSonic
Remembering the Sonics: A Love Letter, An Elegy (Part 2)
What you have to understand about being a Seattle sports fan is that it can be pretty rough. Sure there are pockets of brilliance like the Refuse to Lose Mariners or the Legion of Boom Seahawks or even the ’96 Sonics team that made it to the Finals. But a lot of people from outside of Seattle see names like Payton, Kemp, Griffey, Martínez, Ichiro, Marshawn, Richard Sherman, and Russell Wilson and it’s easy to forget how irrelevant our sports teams have been at times.
The Mariners are now the only MLB team that hasn’t made a World Series and currently own the longest playoff drought in North American sports (18 straight seasons as of 2019). The Seahawks, in the four years prior to drafting Russell Wilson, went a combined 23–41 on their way to becoming the first team in NFL history outside of a strike-shortened season to finish below .500 and make the playoffs in 2010. The Sonics take the cake, of course, with the team being sold to a Clay Bennett-led ownership group in 2006, being dismantled after the ’06-’07 season, and then finishing the ’07-’08 season with a franchise-worst 20–62 record before moving to Oklahoma City.
Even our stretches of dominance are punctuated with famous failures. The Sonics went into the ’94 playoffs as best team in the NBA at 63–19 only to become the first 1-seed to lose to an 8-seed when Denver won three straight games after falling behind 0–2. The Mariners won an American League record 116 games (tied for the Major League record) in 2001 and then were promptly ousted by the Yankees 4–1 in the AL Championship Series. The Seahawks came a yard away from back-to-back championships in 2015 and decided not to hand it off to Marshawn Lynch, resulting in a Russell Wilson interception and another championship for Tom Brady and the Patriots.
I bring all of these examples up to say that, aside from the bandwagon Seahawks fans we’ve seen in the last decade, most Seattle fans expect bad things to happen. It hurts, but it isn’t a surprise. We look for the good things within the suffering: a Félix Hernández Cy Young campaign during a 100-loss season in 2010, Marshawn Lynch’s Beastquake TD-run in a playoff win against the defending champion Saints after that “historic” 2010 season. The Sonics are no exception to this.
After their ’96 run to the Finals, the Sonics tapered off in the late ’90s and early 2000s. They never made it back to the Conference Finals, let alone the NBA Finals. Shawn Kemp stayed around one more season, feeling slighted by Jim McIlvane getting a massive contract in the ’96 offseason. The Sonics would win 61 games in their first year without Kemp, but wouldn’t finish better than seventh in the conference the next four years and missed the playoffs in two of those years, culminating in Gary Payton (who famously did not get along with new team owner Howard Schultz) being traded away in the middle of the ’02-’03 season. Just like that, an era was over. The team and players that had captivated us in the ’90s were gone.
The Sonics are pretty forgettable after this (something, I found in college, that served as justification to a lot of people outside of Seattle for moving the team to OKC). They made the playoffs once in ’05, beating the Kings in the first round before losing to the eventual-champion Spurs in the Conference Semis. Perhaps the most memorable part of those last few seasons in Seattle was Kevin Durant winning Rookie of the Year in his lone season as a Sonic. But, as always, those of us in Seattle found the good within the disappointing, and that good was Ray Allen.
Allen was the big return of the trade that sent Gary Payton to Milwaukee. Ray Allen now is mostly remembered for being the third piece on that Boston Celtics ’08 Championship team, or the three-pointer in the 2013 Finals that arguably saved LeBron James’s legacy. He was only a Sonic for four seasons and change, but for those years he provided some of the only joy for Sonics fans, who had the gift of watching his beautiful jump shot.
The NBA hadn’t yet gone through the Steph Curry revolution. There were no Splash Brothers and teams weren’t riding the three-pointer to death the way the Houston Rockets have the past few years. So to watch Ray Allen those few years in Seattle was like a glimpse into the future. While he never facilitated to teammates the way Curry does, he was fascinating to watch both moving off the ball and creating his own shot, something that gets a little lost in his Boston and Miami years. Watching Allen work was one of the few sources of joy in those last few years of Sonics basketball, witnessing performances that kept us on the edge of our seats such as his career-high 54 points (second only in Sonics history to Downtown Freddie Brown) against Utah, or watching him break the single-season record for three-pointers in ’06 on the last day of the season with 269, a record since obliterated by Curry.
Take for instance January 22nd, 2006. It’s the same day Kobe scored 81 in Toronto. It’s the same day the Seahawks cruise to a 34–14 victory against the Carolina Panthers and make it to their first ever Super Bowl. So this game gets a little lost in the shuffle. The Sonics are 15–24 this season coming off of their first playoff appearance since ’02, and facing down a 26–13 Suns squad. Allen looks bad early, going 4–15 through the first three quarters for 10 points.
The fourth quarter is vintage Ray Allen brilliance. He doesn’t miss, hitting five threes and scoring 21 points in the quarter, including putting Steve Nash on skates for a stepback three that puts the Sonics up 126–124. The game eventually goes to double OT, tied at 149 with two and a half seconds left. Allen gets the inbound pass at the Suns half-court logo, takes one dribble forward, and raises up as Shawn Marion closes out on him. With a hand in his face, Allen drains his eighth three of the game, a buzzer beater to bring him to 42 points for the game and deliver the Sonics a 152–149 victory.
The game wasn’t important. The Sonics would miss the playoffs with a 35–47 record, and the Suns would win their division but finish well out of first place in the West. But it was emblematic of Ray Allen’s time in Seattle. What his go-arounds in Boston and Miami sometimes erase is that he wasn’t just clutch; he was a dynamic scorer for much of his career. While he had some impressive dunks in his later years, injury had taken away some of the explosiveness that marked his early days in Milwaukee (some might laugh at the thought of Allen competing in the ’97 Dunk Contest). Throughout his career he maintained a magnificent shooting touch. And Sonics fans, with Allen as the focal point of our team’s offense, got to witness him at his best, coming into his own as the best shooter in the NBA (at least until Steph showed up).
We watched Ray Allen shoot the lights out of the gym, mostly in meaningless seasons, but that’s just what being a Seattle sports fan is. More often it’s 35–47 type seasons or choking in the playoffs than it is making it to the Finals. So when Allen was traded to Boston shortly after the Sonics drafted Kevin Durant second overall in ’07, it hurt, but we weren’t surprised. We knew the team wouldn’t be around much longer, wouldn’t be ours. We were merely grateful that for a few brief years we got to watch Ray Allen pull up from three, rise up, and drain it in the opponent’s face better than nearly anyone else in league history.
