Enter wild-man George Karl in 1992, an NBA coaching castoff who had a reputation for blowing his stack at the drop of a cell phone. And thus began the greatest stretch of basketball in Sonics' history.

Karl molded the young talent of Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp with veterans like Detlef Schrempf, Hersey Hawkins, Nate McMillan and Sam Perkins into six consecutive 50-plus win seasons -- including a franchise-record 64 victories and a trip to the NBA Finals against the Chicago Bulls in 1995-96.

The knock on Karl, perhaps justifiably, was that he put an all-out premium on each regular season game, demanding his players go to an exhausting trapping defense that churned out the wins in the regular season.

But the regular season exertion might have left the team gassed for the postseason, when the game became more of a halfcourt contest and the traps were vulnerable to the pinpoint passing of guards like Utah's John Stockton.

And thus Karl's reputation in Seattle became: He just can't win the big game. And the coach with the highest winning percentage in Sonics history -- by a long shot (.719 to Lenny Wilken's .543) -- was fired after the 1997-98 season.

Most memorable moment
The scene of Dikembe Mutombo rejoicing while laying on the hardwood after his No. 8-seeded Denver Nuggets defeated the top-seeded Sonics in first round of 1994 playoffs in a nutshell encapsulates the decade for the Sonics. The Nuggets were the first No. 8 seed ever to defeat a No. 1 seed in the postseason.

Seattle was a supremely gifted team that ultimately will have to go down as one of the most underachieving of the decade. They had six consecutive 55-or-more win seasons, including three 60- win seasons. But those numbers turn meaningless when you consider the Nuggets disaster followed up by another first-round embarrassment to the Lakers the next year. The Sonics only made it past the second round of the playoffs twice.

Best team: 1995-96 squad
After two outstanding regular seasons were wiped out by first-round flops in the first round of the playoffs the two prior season, the Sonics finally broke through in a big way in the 1995-96 season -- all the way to the NBA Finals.

But the opponent was Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, and the Sonics quickly went down in the series, 3-0. Seattle came back to swipe the next two games in the Pacific Northwest to make the series interesting, but the Bulls took care of business in Game 6 to win the series, 4-2.

Seattle won 64 games during the regular season, setting the club mark.

Worst team: 1998-99 squad
It's hard to knock a team in a year when a new coach was brought in and a lockout forced an abbreviated training camp and a whirlwind 50-game season.

Still, the Sonics record of 25-25 and their absence from the playoffs wasn't acceptable to Sonics fans, particularly in light of the fact that Westphal inherited a mostly intact team that had won 55 regular-season games or more in six straight seasons. The Sonics had not missed the playoffs since the first year of the decade.