Orlando, Fla. ? This is what happens at the end of road trips, when the miles take away the legs, when room service and jet lag become the sixth and seventh defenders on the floor.
This is what happens when a 48-minute game feels like a doubleheader, when playing a game like Wednesday night’s feels as joyous as taking the SATs again.
This is the hard part. Bouncing from city to city and bouncing back from one big game to the next.
These are the new challenges for the new Sonics. This is what life is like at the top of a division. This is how it feels when your road trips stops at the corner of Expectation and Fatigue.
Life is changing for the 23-7 Sonics. They have become a litmus test for every team they play. Struggling teams, like Orlando, ratchet up their game for the Sonics. Beating Seattle means something again.
“I said at the beginning of the game that now we are the hunted,” Sonics coach Nate McMillan said after the 105-87 loss. “We’ve got to make sure that we always know that we are the hunters. We want to be aggressive. All games. And I thought tonight that that team was more aggressive than us.”
The excuses are built in. The Sonics, who had won six road games in a row, have been away from Seattle since Dec. 19. They were missing starting power forward Reggie Evans.
They were coming off their biggest win of the season, snapping the Miami Heat’s 14-game winning streak on Monday night. And they were gassed.
But if this team is as good as it thinks it is, it won’t allow the excuses to linger. If this team expects to be a legitimate threat in the NBA’s West, it has to bounce back Thursday night in Washington. It doesn’t have to win, but it needs to play with more aggression than it showed in Wednesday night’s weary fourth quarter.
“When you win some of the games that we’ve won, the league focuses its eyes to us,” said guard Antonio Daniels. “The respect is definitely there now and we have to be proud of that, but we can’t be comfortable with it. We have to keep coming out with that same hunger that we started the season with.”
Before the coaches came into the locker room after the game, Ray Allen gathered his teammates and talked about the theory of bounce back.
“I told them these are the best moments right here in sports,” said Allen, who scored 16 of his 30 points in the first quarter. “The best moments are when you see guys step up and are accountable for the team’s shortcomings. These moments here are when you can show the true resiliency of a team.
“It’s important now, because teams are watching us when we lose, looking to see how we respond, so we have to answer the call. Teams now feel good about winning against us. I can imagine in the (Orlando) locker room they’re saying right now that this is the spark that they needed.”
This was a deja vu loss. A brief return to those chilling days of last season. A loss circa 2003-04. The Sonics were pounded on the glass, 52-36. They shot 35 percent. Vlade Radmanovic was 3-for-16. And their long rebounds ignited Orlando fastbreaks.
It all looked so familiar.
“Our offense was in a funk,” Allen said.
The Sonics couldn’t close out Orlando’s jump shooters. They didn’t have an answer for Steve Francis, who lit them up for 35 points, 11 rebounds and 6 assists And, after cutting an 11-point Orlando lead to 83-80 with 8:24 left, they hit the wall.
“We just got out-worked tonight, McMillan said. “Just not a good performance. It was a bad night.”
A loss like this can be defining of deflating, depending on how the Sonics react.
“We’ve had adversity this year and the way we’ve responded thus far has been very positive,” Daniels said. “Our motto this year is to not lose two in a row. We’ve been talking about that every time we lose.
“We’ve been saying that no matter what the situation may be. No matter how bad we played, we never want to come back the following game and play that bad and lose two games in a row. Tonight was a bad game period. From top to bottom, but all season we’ve come out and played harder and played better after a loss.”
In a long season there are going to be games like this. Moments when the spirit is willing, but the legs don’t work. Jump shots fall short. Rebounds are snatched away.
There are moments, like this second-longest trip of the year, when the road sucks the breath out of a team.
Good teams understand this. Playoff teams respond to it. Now the league is hunting the Sonics and watching to see how they react to the bad times.
“We didn’t play well at all,” McMillan said. “You have games like this and you can look at a lot of different reasons why, but the bottom line is we didn’t play very well.”
And on Thursday night the hunt continues anew.
