Lakers make losing look effortless
Reporting from Boston
Those icy fingers up and down your spine...
Or around your throat.
No, it’s not witchcraft, just the Celtics, as usual.
With Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom getting ever fainter until they looked like ghosts, and Ron Artest getting ever dizzier until he looked like a purple tornado, the Lakers capped a long bad week with Sunday’s 92-86 loss in Game 5, one of the great face-plants in a history replete with comic opera moments.
Before the Celtics invited them back into the game, the Lakers gave it away with a third quarter in which everything they had accomplished this postseason went up in flames.
While Kobe Bryant went off as only he and a few others in the game’s history could, scoring 19 of his 38 points in the third quarter, the Lakers let the Celtics score on 12 of the first 13 possessions.
Four of the Celtics’ baskets came after missing shots.
In other words, the Celtics made it or, when they missed, got it back and put it up again until it went in.
Forget getting a rebound, the Lakers may not have touched one for the first eight minutes of the third quarter.
Said Lakers Coach Phil Jackson, setting a new record for understatement:
“I agree.”
How did he account for it?
“Well, we called a timeout and got into their face a little bit about how we got ourselves on the wrong side of people and gave up layups,” Jackson said.
And the difference in the effort level in a game of such magnitude?
“I thought they used position very well in that quarter,” said Jackson, setting a new record for gobbledygook.
“ Basketball is a pretty simple game. You try and stay between the basket and your man and we had three situations where they displaced our man and had some easy baskets and I thought they did a really good job of passing the ball from [ Rajon] Rondo, [ Kevin] Garnett, [ Ray] Allen, etc.
“I don’t think it was lack of effort as much as being prepared for what they thought, what they could do when they came out.”
Actually, basketball is even simpler than that.
I think the Lakers big men stopped playing because the Celtics took their hearts.
When the ball was loose, the Celtics got it, unless they fumbled it away or two of them dived on it and knocked it over to a Laker.
Coaches call those 50-50 plays, but in the last two games, they were 90-10 plays.
That came in handy for the Celtics, rocked as they were by Bryant’s fireworks show.
“I think he had 19 in the quarter,” Boston Coach Doc Rivers said. “I’m not sure, it seemed like more...
“It’s amazing what that does to your team. We were up, I think, 12 or 10 when he was making that run and we had to use a timeout to settle our guys down.”
“Well, I would say it was the toughest shot that I ever seen somebody hit while I was on the court.... He was shooting fadeaway threes, fadeaway jumpers off the double team.
“He’s a heck of a player. You’ve got to expect that from him.... You know, it’s going to happen. Kobe is the one guy that you probably can’t stop in this league, but we feel like with these other guys we can slow them down and almost shut them down and we’ll give ourselves a great chance at winning.”
On the bright side for the Lakers, they’re going home.
If they were coming here after something like this in Staples Center — as they did in 2008 after blowing that 24-point lead in Game 4 — the Celtics might be 30-point favorites in Game 6.
Instead, the Lakers live to fight another day, or one day, because “fight” wasn’t a good way to describe Sunday’s effort.
Another code blue or two and they could be right back in it.
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