Sonics' issues go far beyond any failures of coach Hill

As the Sonics were strolling through their loss Sunday night to the Los Angeles Clippers. As the players barely made the effort to bend into defensive crouches.

As their guard play was so bad their offense looked as if it were drawn up on an Etch A Sketch and jumper after jumper clanged harmlessly off the rim.

As the crowd began to leave en masse as if Jack Bauer had grabbed the mike and screamed, "Leave the building. Now!"

As the Clippers scored all of two points in the first 10 minutes of the fourth quarter and still led by more than 20, I kept staring at Sonics coach Bob Hill.

I watched him run through his mental to-do list, searching for some way to turn around a game inexorably headed downhill. Probably even he knew it was hopeless. Even he knew that, at least on this night, his team had abandoned him.

This loss, at home to a tired Clippers team, had all the feel of a coach-killing. The Sonics quit on Hill.

And now, as the season turns into the dog days of February, the Sonics are 12 games below .500, losers of 14 in a row on the road, mired in another in a long series of losing seasons.

And at the same time this season is disappearing into the tank, the state Legislature awaits the final proposal for a new all-purpose arena that will determine whether this 40-year-old franchise stays or goes.

And new owner Clay Bennett has to be wondering what kind of team he will be putting into that arena.

At the worst possible time in their history, the Sonics are unraveling.

Something has to give.

This team, this season, needs to create some sort of excitement, even if it's short-lived. Then it has to show the legislators, show the fans, that a season this dreary won't be tolerated.

The drum beat has begun on NBA blogs and inside the league's rumor mill, saying Hill is about to be fired. I don't think firing Hill is the answer. I think it's the quick, cosmetic solution. I think it's too easy blaming Hill and even easier to fire him.

But this season isn't all his fault. Not even close.

He lost his starting center, Robert Swift, before the season started. He lost Ray Allen for a stretch early in the season when the Sonics were trying to establish an identity.

Hill lost his All-Star forward, Rashard Lewis, for almost half a season. And he has had to coach through the distraction of the arena controversy.

He was handed a broken team. He was given an impossible mission. He had no chance.

Nonetheless, he probably will be the scapegoat. Coaches always are.

If firing Hill is the only change the Sonics make, it won't mean a thing. It would be just one more tweak for a franchise that always seems to be tweaking its way to mediocrity.

It would be selling false hope.

Team vice chairman Lenny Wilkens, coach of the 1979 NBA championship team and Hill's most likely successor, won't turn the Sonics into a winner in the last third of the season. He doesn't have enough time.

The Sonics of 2006-07 are done. Their season is as dead as Windows98.

The goal for the rest of the season should be to stockpile draft picks. To get bad, so the Sonics can get good again. To begin a serious rebuilding program whose success could be timed with the opening of a new arena.

This franchise can't keep selling false hope. It can't keep making midseason trades for Earl Watson and Chris Wilcox, as it did last season, and expect to improve.

Wilkens would be the fourth coach in three seasons, which probably is the most serious evidence this franchise is stuck in neutral.

The fans aren't about to rally around one more half-hearted attempt to stay the course. The Sonics have stayed the course far too long.

If this franchise wants a new building, it needs a new look. It needs more than cosmetics. It needs to make multiple, dramatic changes.

Otherwise, firing Bob Hill is just a cruel and meaningless move.

Steve Kelley: 206-464-2176 or skelley@seattletimes.com