Seattle supersonics wordmark5/29/2023 ![]() He also made history when he signed with the SuperSonics before his four-year college eligibility had expired, something prohibited by the NBA. Haywood's talent wasn't the only thing notable about him. On January 3, 1973, he scored 51 points in a game (breaking Rule's team-record) and went on to be named to four straight All-Star teams. A former ABA superstar (the first ABA player to cross over to the NBA), Haywood soon established himself as the SuperSonics' most effective scorer. Perhaps part of what made Wilkens expendable was the arrival of Spencer Haywood, who signed with the SuperSonics midway through the 1969-1970 season. In a stunning move that infuriated the team's fans, Wilkens was traded in the offseason to Cleveland for guard Butch Beard, who played one unspectacular season for Seattle. Starting with the 1969-1970 season, Wilkens served as the SuperSonics' player-coach, and thanks in part to his own excellent play on the court, he coached the team to its first winning season (47 wins, 35 losses) in 1971-1972. Wilkens made three consecutive All-Star appearances from 1969-71, earning All-Star Game MVP honors in 1971. Louis Hawks in exchange for Seattle's original All-Star, Hazzard. He was named an All-Star for the 1969-1970 season.īut the Sonics' biggest star was the newly arrived Lenny Wilkens, who had come from the St. Rule continued to be a scoring force, tallying 49 points on November 15, 1969, to set a then-team record for points in a game. Individual accolades were about the only glory associated with the SuperSonics during their first seven seasons, as the team finished with a winning record only once. And Al Tucker and Bob Rule, the Sonics' first- and second-round picks, respectively, in the 1967 college draft, were named to the NBA All-Rookie team. Walt Hazzard, whom the SuperSonics had acquired in the 1967 expansion draft, finished the season as the NBA's seventh-leading scorer (23.9 points per game) and represented Seattle at the NBA All-Star Game. The only real highlights for Seattle that first year were individual honors earned by a trio of players. In typical expansion team fashion, the SuperSonics struggled to win all season, losing 12 of their first 14 games en route to a final regular season record of 23-59 - second-worst in the NBA, but eight games better than San Diego. ![]() ![]() The SuperSonics returned the favor the next night (October 21), however, downing the Rockets 117-110 in overtime. Under the guidance of head coach Al Bianchi, Seattle lost its first-ever regular-season game to the San Francisco Warriors by a score of 144-116 on October 13, 1967, then followed that up with another loss in its first regular season home game, a 121-114 defeat at the hands of expansion rivals, the San Diego Rockets. As the vast majority of expansion teams do, the Sonics stumbled out of the gate. It was difficult to gauge that from the team's on-court performance during its inaugural season. That honor went to a pair of opportunistic Californians, Eugene Klein and Sam Schulman, who were able to see what our local business community apparently could not - that NBA basketball had a promising future in Seattle. ![]() The irony being that none of Seattle's vocal sports boosters stepped up to purchase the franchise rights when the time came. Seattle's metropolitan-area population exceeded 1 million the 14,000-seat Seattle Center Coliseum, left over from the 1962 World's Fair, was a good basketball venue and business leaders had been courting prospective sports teams for years in an attempt to validate the city as a major metropolitan hub, or, in the parlance, to make it "major league." There was little doubt that Seattle was ready to support such an endeavor. Seattle landed its first professional sports franchise when the National Basketball Association (NBA), feeling some pressure from a rival league, the American Basketball Association, decided to expand into eight new cities for the 1967-1968 season. Part 1 of this two-part history tells the Sonics' story from the beginning of the franchise to the World Championship year of 1979. The team's 41-year run in Seattle came to a controversial end in 2008. Names like Lenny Wilkens, Spencer Haywood, Slick Watts, Gus Williams, Fred Brown, Jack Sikma, and Gary Payton evoke passionate responses from fans who followed the team since its first game in 1967. Longtime Seattle natives remember where they were when the SuperSonics finished off the Washington Bullets in Game 5 of the 1979 NBA Finals as vividly as when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Seattle's National Basketball Association team for 41 years, the SuperSonics were the city's first major league sports franchise and won a championship in 1979.
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