Great expectations can be the Dickens

Sporting News, The, Nov 21, 1994 by Kevin Simpson

The huge banner that flutters on the side of the arena in the morning breeze, with letters visible from the downtown high-rises across the interstate, screams a slogan that promises to become the mantra for a season: We Have A Dream. Just below, fans already have lined up at the ticket window, slapping down plastic for the privilege of sharing the vision.

Inside, Nuggets Coach Dan Issel sits in his office and frowns at videotape of the next opponent. It is roughly 12 hours since his team's opening-night victory, an almost clinical dismantling of the Timberwolves, but already his brow is furrowed into a deep indentation that indicates even deeper concern. The coach whose Cinderella team went to the ball in size-15 hightops and danced long past midnight knows well how a fairy-tale finish one season can stretch the fans' imagination at the start of the next.

Issel considers the promotional slogan and suddenly grins like a lawyer who has found a loophole. "We don't say what the dream is," he says.

A thousand miles to the east, Pacers President and General Manager Donnie Walsh, who once coached the Nuggets and a center named Issel through a nightmarish 30-52 season, also ponders the potential for disappointement when sudden success, opportunistic marketing and basketball reality collide. Then he quickly dismisses the thought.

"I do the marketing," he figures.

On mountain and plain, last year's playoff darlings now find themselves treading a fine line between seductive expectations and hard promises. It is dangerous territory. No two teams face greater potential backlash from the vast difference between what the ticket-buying public embraces as hot possibilities and what the basketball people, from the front office to the end of the bench, know to be the cold truths of the NBA.

But consider the temptation to engage in rampant reverie.

Out West, the Nuggets played havoc with the public's pulse during a 12-game stretch in which they eliminated the Sonics, the team widely thought to be the best in the league, and took the Jazz to a seventh game. In the process, the House of Mutombo shook with anticipation as it hadn't since the wildly fashionable mid-1970s, when the club led the league in attendance and a coach named Larry Brown stomped the sideline in designer overalls.

In the East, the Pacers swept the Magic, mopped up the Hawks in six and came five points from going to the Finals before being jolted back to reality in a seventh game against the Knicks in New York. During this unprecedented quest, which unfolded during that period in late May when the Indianapolis sports pages are traditionally dominated by time trials and pole position, the Pacers stole the headlines. With Reggie Miller casting up treys and Rik Smits becoming a dominant offensive force in the low post, Market Square Arena was definitely no brickyard.

That was then. This is now.

In Denver, where the recent memory of a cardiac playoff run threatens to distort reality, a 42-40 team suddenly is saddled with the nice, round, arbitrary figure of 50 victories as a measure of incremental improvement. The club quickly reached its self-imposed cap of 13,000 season tickets and, with half the dates virtually sold out already, stands a reasonable chance of filling the arena for every home game.

"Certainly, we want to be thought of as a good basketball team, and we want respect around the league," Issel says. "To achieve that, you're going to have some expectations. But to pick an arbitrary number like 50 games, my question is: What eight games are we going to win that we lost last year?"

Say you come up with five or six -- or maybe even eight. Issel can recall six or eight victories that never should have been.

"It seems sometimes like there's no middle ground," he says. "For three years we stunk, and now we're great. There are steps that happen getting from stinky to great. I think we ought to be allowed to take those steps. But I'd rather have the expectations than to have people say we're not any good."

It's the First Law of Spectator Sport: Expectations instantly expand to fill the void previously left by absolutely no expectations at all. The young but developing Nuggets slipped into the playoffs harboring no illusions. A team with only two players who had ever suited up for a playoff game would drink in the atmosphere, take notes on the jacked-up intensity of the postseason and then make a respectful exit, with the intention of regrouping in the fall to continue its deliberate march toward respectability.

The first two games went as scripted. But then the Sonics lost three straight, the deciding game in overtime on their home floor. It was an anticlimax when those Kingdome tiles eventually crashed to the ground. Fans at the Coliseum already had seen the roof cave in.

The Nuggets proceeded to stretch the Jazz to the limit and then, with the rest of a mortified sporting public, watched the Rockets beat the Knicks for what might easily have been mistaken by the average channel surfer for the Australian rules football championship. The grim pathos of the Finals only encouraged fans at the foot of the Rockies to invoke that tantalizing transitive property of sports: The Rockets won the title; the Nuggets won the season series with the Rockets; ergo, this Nuggets team that had just managed to break .500 for the first time in four years could...