Sunday night was “Kids at the Key” to celebrate Squatch’s 15th birthday, for which the hirsuite mascot was joined by swarms of little ones and nine of his closest mascot friends. (He’s now old enough to take driver’s ed–to think he’s been riding that Harley all these years without a license!) So many enthusiastic and uncritical attendees made for a Key that rocked like few in recent memory. After a first half Nick Collison tip jam, I saw a young girl in a pink and purple velour warm-up jacket celebrate so vigorously in the aisle that she tripped on a stair and crashed into an adjacent seat.

As for the game, the Sonics provided plenty to cheer about, taking the Kings down to the wire in a heartbreaking 103-101 defeat (that’s 14 straight, if you’re counting). Johan Petro continued his solid play, Wally Z displayed amazing intensity for a 30-year-old with bad ankles and a great contract on a losing team, and Kevin Durant compensated for his poor night shooting by willing himself to the free throw line, repeatedly flinging his 19-year-old bones into the veteran muscle defending the basket.

(Another Durant anecdote: as he walked by the scorer’s table after a late fourth quarter timeout, he high-fived a couple of kids sitting in the front row. From twenty rows back, they looked to be in their early adolescence. It struck me that Durant is much closer to their age than to that of some of his teammates.)

Nevertheless, despite the energy of the night and some great play by the young Supes (the highlight being a steal by Durant who then passed to Green for the tomahawk dunk, thus endangering the girl in the velour jacket), it wasn’t enough to beat Kevin Martin. The Kings’ super-skinny shooting guard scored five points in the last 17 seconds on one free throw and two improbable shots, the last being a coast-to-coast drive for a buzzer-beating baseline jumper after an even more improbable game-tying-three by Damien Wilkins, who’d just come in after a long stretch on the bench. Thanks to lots of offseason work, Martin has gone from late-first-round afterthought to outright star. Should the young Sonics follow his lead, the team could be good before tonight’s kids are old enough to know that it’s not.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 1:50 am and is filed under Supersonics, Roundball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.