Phoenix Remains in Ashes--Lakers Sweep Them Away

The only thing Magic Johnson said about the Laker series with Phoenix was a four-letter word-- over .

“That’s all it is,” Johnson said. “It doesn’t mean too much right now.”

Maybe it will mean more to the Lakers in the second playoff round when they can pick on somebody their own size.

The Lakers blew out the Suns again Tuesday night, 119-103, to sweep their best-of-five series, 3-0.

That’s three games, three victories and three romps, just as everyone expected. The Suns gave out mini first-aid kits to the 8,741 fans who came to Veterans Coliseum, but they probably should have given them blindfolds and cigarettes instead.

“We could have lost these three by 50, 50 and 50,” the Suns’ Alvan Adams said. “We played about as well as we could under the circumstances.”

This one wasn’t quite as easy for the Lakers as the other two games, but the Suns just couldn’t put up much of a fight without James Edwards, Walter Davis and Larry Nance, their three top players, who never suited up because of injuries.

“I’ve been bleeding all year,” Sun General Manager Jerry Colangelo said. “Tonight, the bleeding stopped.”

If there was relief in the Phoenix locker room, there was something only mildly similar to it in the Laker locker room.

The Lakers realize that their post-season is just beginning. From here on out, they won’t be facing teams with such a physical disadvantage as the Suns had.

“All we did was just get on to the rest of it (the playoffs),” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar said. “We understand we had the advantage. There’s no reason for us to be in here crowing about how great we played.”

The Lakers weren’t great in Game 3, but they were certainly good enough to take the Suns out. After being tied at the end of the first quarter, the Lakers led by 13 points at halftime, then put the game away with a quick burst to open the fourth quarter.

Phoenix rode the scoring of Maurice Lucas (26 points), who was making a strong bid to keep his job, and trailed, 86-77, after three quarters before the roof caved in.

Bob McAdoo, who finished with 15 points and Mike McGee, who had 17, shot the Lakers to a 100-83 lead five minutes into the fourth quarter. The Laker lead eventually grew to 111-91 with four minutes left, and that was that.

For the Lakers, they walked off the court knowing they had accomplished merely what everyone assumed they would before the series started. They played a must-win series with very little satisfaction in it, except to get it over with.

“It was obvious that the Suns just didn’t have enough,” Laker Coach Pat Riley said. “We needed to finish this one and in their decimated state, our challenge was to ourselves. Sometimes it was pretty and other times it wasn’t.”

James Worthy scored 23 points to lead the Lakers, including an off-balance three-pointer at the first-half buzzer that perhaps more than any other play in the series exposed the Suns lack of players and experience.

The Suns were within 10 points and had a chance to cut the Laker lead even more, but rookie Michael Holton fired up a wild three-pointer even though there were still eight seconds remaining.

McAdoo rebounded the misfire and passed downcourt to Worthy, who calmly shot his three-pointer. A potential seven- or eight-point game was suddenly 13.

“It wasn’t as easy as it looked,” said Worthy, who said the same thing about the series.

Abdul-Jabbar scored 18 points and Johnson scored 13 points with 11 assists while McGee (17 points) and McAdoo (15) came off the bench to provide just enough spark to end this series in the minimum number of games.

“We’ll take the win,” McAdoo said. “We know we didn’t play their best team.”

There wasn’t a lot of finesse on the court in Game 3, even less than the first two games, but the Lakers did manage to outrebound the Suns, 42-37. They probably should have dominated that area by a greater margin, for Phoenix was down to just two big men, Adams and Lucas, with 6-8 Charles Jones sidelined because of an ankle injury.

Lucas said the Lakers are going to have to play rougher down the road.

“If they come out and play as physical as they did tonight, they’ll be right right,” he said. “But I can see them getting in trouble if they don’t.”

Meanwhile, Riley is worried that the Lakers aren’t in game condition after winning 20 of their last 22 regular-season games and crushing the Suns in three games. He is concerned his front-line players haven’t been getting enough work.

“We’ll get a lot more next round,” said Johnson.

He wasn’t smiling when he said it.

Laker Notes Magic Johnson set an NBA assist record for a three-game series with 4. . . . The Lakers also set four team records for a three-game playoff series: field goals (165), shooting percentage (60.0%), assists (104) and points (408). . . . Magic Johnson played 35 minutes in Game 3, the most of any Laker. His 95 minutes in the series were more than any teammate . . . Abdul-Jabbar said he has stopped taking medication for strep throat but doesn’t think he will have his stamina back for a couple more days. . . . Pat Riley admitted after the game that he expected all along to sweep the series. “But I never would have said that to them before,” the coach said. . . . As it turns out, Laker owner Jerry Buss wasn’t the only NBA owner to be fined by the league. Buss was fined an undisclosed amount by Commissioner David Stern because the Lakers left Johnson at home, an unexcused absence, when the team finished the regular season at Kansas City. Also fined were San Antonio Spurs’ owner Angelo Drossos, for comments about the league’s salary cap, and Dallas Mavericks’ owner Donald Carter, who entered the officials’ dressing room to talk with referee Earl Strom after a regular-season game at Dallas. None of the amounts of the fines were disclosed, not even to the league’s board of governors, when the fines were levied.