Lakers Have Day to Forget, 121-98

Somewhere along the way, the Lakers knew down deep in their sneakers, there would be games like this.

Sometimes you’re good, sometimes you’re not so good and other times you’re downright awful.

Against the Detroit Pistons in the Silverdome Sunday afternoon, the Lakers were awful. They got their heads handed to them by the Pistons, 121-98, in their worst defeat of the season.

Afterward, the Lakers forced a few grins, thankful they had lost only a game and not their sense of humor.

“Things like this happen,” Michael Cooper said. “I’m just glad we got out of it alive. It was just our day for a stinker.”

A crowd of 23,475 and a national television audience saw Isiah Thomas wreck the Lakers with 30 points and 20 assists, personally accounting for 70 of the 94 points the Pistons scored when he was on the floor.

The Lakers were outshot, outrebounded and out-assisted, and they committed nine more turnovers than the Pistons. The Lakers started flat, stayed flat, finished flat and got thoroughly crunched.

“This game belongs in only one place--the outhouse,” Kurt Rambis said.

Trailing by 16 points at halftime, the Lakers never got closer than 13 points the rest of the way.

“Whatever it was, it was total--I’m just glad we’ve got a quick flight out of town,” Coach Pat Riley said before boarding a bus to the airport to catch a plane for Milwaukee.

Thomas wasn’t the only Piston doing damage. Forward Dan Roundfield had 20 points and 14 rebounds, guard John Long scored 19 points and center Bill Laimbeer had 13 rebounds.

The Lakers, meanwhile, could do very little right. Magic Johnson finished with 22 points and 10 assists, but the Lakers were pretty much out of it after the second quarter when Detroit rang up 35 points to take a 62-46 halftime lead.

James Worthy, who scored 20 points, had 16 points in the first half and represented most of the Laker offense at that point.

Thomas was already well on his way to one of his more memorable games.

Thomas rainbowed in a three-pointer, dropped a no-look bounce pass to Roundfield, hit 14 of 20 shots and even moved ahead of Johnson as the National Basketball Assn. leader in assists, but just barely.

Thomas now averages 12.2 assists, whereas Johnson’s average dropped slightly to 12.0.

“I’ll remember this one,” Thomas said. “But then, I remember all the wins.”

Riley said Thomas’ game was by far the best he had ever played against the Lakers, who picked the same time to play their poorest game of the season.

Their previous low-water mark were 16-point defeats in consecutive games against Denver and Golden State in early November.

There were plenty of other negatives to consider Sunday: Detroit’s 56 rebounds were the most the Lakers had allowed all season; it was the first Laker loss by more than six points since Nov. 25, and it ended the Lakers’ streak of four consecutive victories on the road.

If it weren’t for doing bad things out on the floor, the Lakers wouldn’t have done anything at all. Rambis said the Lakers were just flat.

“We didn’t get any effort out of anybody,” he said. “If someone was playing all right, everybody else wasn’t. Everybody took their turn playing badly.”

Mike McGee scored 22 points in 28 minutes, but most of them came in non-quality time. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had 13 rebounds, but he made only 6-of-12 shots in 33 minutes to finish with 14 points. In Friday night’s victory at Dallas, he had 30 points.

Abdul-Jabbar couldn’t explain what happened, except to say that the Pistons played well and the Lakers obviously didn’t.

“Their defense was good, but then I guess we were a big factor in that,” he said. “The traveling might have caught up with us, but that’s just an excuse because all teams have to deal with that. I know we can play better, but even if we had, we still wouldn’t have won.”

Riley hadn’t given up hope by the start of the fourth quarter, even though the Pistons were up, 89-71. Abdul-Jabbar and Johnson were both in the game when Detroit ran to a 97-73 lead with 9:50 left.

Piston Coach Chuck Daly put Thomas and Laimbeer back in the game, and they pumped the lead to 105-81 before Riley finally conceded and turned to his nonstarters.

With 6:06 to play, Jamaal Wilkes and Mitch Kupchak made their first appearances in the blowout. Wilkes made both of his field-goal attempts and had two rebounds during his venture into garbage time.

“You can’t do much in a situation like that, except maybe do something that will reinforce the negative things some people feel about you anyway,” Wilkes said. “But I guess it’s better to play a little bit than not play at all.”

Riley had little to say about the Laker performance. When pressed, he managed to come up with one nice thing.

“We showed up,” he said.

Other than that, the Lakers had little impact on the game. Abdul-Jabbar glanced at a box-score sheet, then threw it in a trash barrel.

“I’m putting it in the circular file,” he said.