The way Wally Walker remembers it, he and the other members of the Seattle SuperSonics trudged into a Kansas City hotel room on Nov. 30, 1977, hours before a game against the host Kings, to meet their new coach. To say it was a dispirited group would be an understatement. The Sonics – you know them today as the Oklahoma City Thunder – were 5-17 to that point in the season.
“This was a team that had no confidence, no belief,” Walker recalled over the phone recently. “We weren’t just losing; we were getting killed every night.”
That’s largely true. Nine of those 17 losses were by 10 points or more. But now the man replacing the fired Bob Hopkins – fellow by the name of Lenny Wilkens – stood before those players and told them that there was enough talent in the room to win.
Turns out there was. That night the Sonics beat the Kings, who have long since moved to Sacramento. Two nights later, they drubbed the Celtics in Boston. Before too long they had won six straight, then 11 of 12. By the end of the season they were 47-35 – 42-18 under Wilkens – and loaded for bear.
They stormed through the first three rounds of the playoffs, then had a 3-2 lead over Washington in the Finals before the Bullets (now the Wizards) took the last two games, including a 105-99 Game 7 victory in Seattle.
“I think it’s the greatest in-season turnaround in history, not just in basketball,” said Walker, a Penn Manor graduate who played eight NBA seasons in all. “When does a team go from either the worst or the next to the worst to Game 7 of the Finals that same year?”
The 71-year-old Walker, now a deputy athletics director at the University of Virginia (his alma mater) and former Sonics executive, acknowledges his own bias, that this view is solely “through (his) lens.” But it’s a compelling one nonetheless, and made that much more so by the fact that Seattle returned to the Finals the following season and beat the Bullets in five games. It is the only championship the team won while in the Emerald City.
It is also one of the many reasons to celebrate Wilkens, who died Nov. 9 at the age of 88. In all he won 1,332 games while coaching six teams over 32 seasons. His is the third-highest victory total of all time, behind Gregg Popovich and Don Nelson. Wilkens is in the Hall of Fame not only as a coach but as a player – a point guard, he was an All-Star in nine of his 15 seasons – as well as an assistant on the ‘92 Dream Team. He won another gold medal as Team USA’s head coach at the ‘96 Games.
But his only NBA title was the one in ‘79. And that was rooted in the previous season. In that hotel room, really. Walker, acquired in an early season trade from Portland (where he had been part of the Bill Walton-led championship team as a rookie in ‘76-77), saw it all unfold in real time.
“We were 2-10 when I got there (to Seattle),” he said, tongue buried in cheek, “so I really helped us to 3-7.”
Walker actually started that Nov. 30 game against Kansas City, going 4-for-16 from the floor and scoring eight points (albeit with 10 rebounds) in an 86-84 victory. But in Boston Wilkens made wholesale changes to the starting lineup, replacing Walker and fellow forward Paul Silas with John Johnson and rookie Jack Sikma, and benching guard Slick Watts in favor of second-year man Dennis Johnson. (The other two starters were Gus Williams and Marvin Webster.)
“There’s nobody that was looking around that locker room and saying we’ve got a couple Hall of Fame players here (in Sikma and Johnson), and a Hall of Fame coach,” Walker said. “Nobody thought that for a second. And it turns out we did.”
Johnson, later part of two championship teams in Boston, was a particular revelation – a big, athletic guard who emerged as one of the best perimeter defenders of his generation. There were also sizable hints as to his mettle at that early stage of his career: After missing all 14 of his shots in that Game 7 loss to Washington in ‘78, he was named MVP of the Finals the following spring.
To hear Walker tell it, Wilkens was adept at bringing the best out of not only DJ but everybody else, too. He did it quietly and directly, pulling guys aside and making clear his expectations, while at the same time putting them in the best position to succeed on the floor.
“And he always had such respect and dignity for all of us as players,” Walker said. “And sometimes, of course, we were knuckleheads and we tested that. But yeah, most of us were in our early 20s, and we did what guys in their 20s do sometimes. But he was so patient.”
More than once Walker found himself on the business end of one of Wilkens’ sidebar conversations. And he remembers his coach addressing him “in a very direct and sometimes stern way, as if to say, ‘You can do better.’”
“I had a couple of those,” Walker added. “And I needed them.”
So while Wilkens’ outward demeanor was serene, it would be a mistake to view him as soft. He grew up poor in Brooklyn, and because he needed to work to help support his family – his dad having died when he was 5 – didn’t play organized basketball until his senior year of high school. He knew the struggle. He knew that time should never be wasted, that every opportunity should be maximized.
Which is how he carved out an All-America career at Providence, and a long NBA run. He was a player-coach in Seattle and Portland toward the end, and even when he began coaching full-time, his on-court skills remained intact. Walker learned that for himself in Seattle, where if his club was short-handed Wilkens would jump into scrimmages as the point guard on the second team.
“My reaction to that was, gee, I wish he was still on the roster,” Walker said, “because if you were open for a second, that ball was there.”
That was Lenny, though – providing what needed to be provided, and doing it in an understated way. Understanding what needed to be done, whether on the court, along the sideline or even in a hotel room in Kansas City, then reaping the rewards.