Nate, Still Great?

It’s Oklahoma City. It’s not the Seattle SuperSonics. They’re gone, and they’ve changed locations and it’s a total different franchise. I’ve been away from Seattle for four years now, so I’m kind of past missing that situation. It is a little different that we’re not going to Seattle to play. But this has happened before. Teams in our league, they move, they change. And this situation here doesn’t feel strange or different.
-Nate McMillan, to the Daily Oklahoman, February, 2009

The above comes courtesy of a commenter in a story from the weekend, and, after reading it, it leaves me, not surprisingly, with the sort of conflicting emotions normally reserved for a hated boss getting fired, or a Karl Malone paternity suit.

You see, if you’ve read this website for more than a week you’ll know that the three of us worship almost no person affiliated with the Seattle Sonics more than Nate McMillan. As a player, McMillan always gave more than his statistics indicated, and we ate it up like hungry orphans on a soup line.

His divorce from the Sonics was messy, no doubt. Fueled by resentment over his treatment by Howard Schultz – an emotion shared by many of us, from fans to co-owners to fellow employees – McMillan left the Emerald City for Portland with more baggage than what he put into the moving van. I’m not Bob Newhart - or Frasier Crane, for that matter - but it doesn’t take a trained psychoanalyst to figure out that Nate was peeved at being shown less than top-level treatment from the only franchise he had known as a professional athlete and coach.

Perhaps, just perhaps, at that point McMillan became a professional, in the true sense of the word, with no emotional ties to the city in which he resided. It’s the logical position to take for a man in his chosen profession – coaches are, famously, hired to be fired. As brightly as his star shines in Portland today, he knows he is merely one 37-win season away from being an assistant coach in Charlotte.

There is more to the story, of course. Sonic fans remember well how George Karl minced no words in showing his displeasure for the way the NBA treated Seattle, and Karl was treated perhaps even worse than McMillan by the Sonic braintrust. The differences between Nate and George are more than their physical appearance, though.

For one, Karl came to Seattle well versed in the vagabond nature of an NBA employee, and carried no notions of an emotional bond between a man and the city in which he is employed.

Secondly, Karl has been gone from Seattle for more than a decade, and, as they say, time has a strong ability to heal wounds.

McMillan, however, can still finger the scab from his excision from Seattle, and, as the only city he had ever known as a professional, his disappointment at being shown the door would no doubt be stronger than Karl’s.

(And, yes, I am aware that Nate was offered a contract by the Sonics and turned it down in favor of Portland’s offer. But you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think McMillan felt undervalued by the Seattle front office).

Mind you, this is not a blanket forgiveness for what McMillan said about the Sonics’ situation. As every seven-year-old can tell you, not saying anything at all will always trump negativity. Nate knows better than anyone that his beef was with the Sonics’ front office, not the city or the fans. To pretend that he felt no differently about the Sonics’ move than he did about the Vancouver Grizzlies moving to Memphis is obviously a lie. Unless he underwent a lobotomy on crossing the Columbia River, McMillan has to feel at least a twinge of sadness at knowing the Sonics no longer exist, that they’ve been replaced by something called the Thunder.

At the same time, I can understand his comments. Just as we haven’t forgotten how much Nate gave us as a player and a coach, he can’t forget how poorly – from his viewpoint – he was treated. Obviously, whatever bitterness that relocation engendered still lives on, and he’s not ready to move on.

Fair enough. That’s his right. I feel confident, though, that if 82games could somehow formulate a system which added up all the positives Nate McMillan gave this city in the course of 20 years of service, then subtracted whatever negatives he’s accrued in the four years since he left, I think it would clearly show he’s still well on the positive side of the ledger.

You see, when the hero falls, maybe the hero worshipers fall harder. … It was all the other folks who decided he must be someone else, something more.

Frank DeFord, Sports Illustrated, March 2003