Lakers Try to Take Altitude Out of the Nuggets in Denver

If there was any doubt in their minds before, the Lakers are now quite certain that they are going to be tested and possibly extended in their Western Conference championship series with the Denver Nuggets.

All those chants of “We want Boston” from the crowds in the Forum have been silenced for a while. The Lakers have got their hands--and their heads--full with Denver right now.

“We’ve got our focus back,” Laker Coach Pat Riley said. “No one likes to lose and get embarrassed.”

Quite unexpectedly, both happened to the Lakers Tuesday night. Not only did they lose convincingly, 136-114, but they also played their worst game of the playoffs.

The best-of-seven series, tied at 1-1, moves to McNichols Arena for Game 3 tonight and Game 4 Sunday afternoon. The Nuggets have new life, due to the Laker mistakes in Game 2, but Riley believes that his team might even benefit, now that the series seems to have acquired a life of its own.

“When you come up with a miserable performance, you have a tendency to be surprised,” Riley said. “What’s happened is that it’s put everybody back in the right perspective.

“It’s like we got caught with a left hook and got staggered a little bit. That one game was our smelling salts to get us alert again.”

For the first time in the playoffs, neither Kareem Abdul-Jabbar nor Magic Johnson was a factor, which hurt the Lakers almost as much as their stand-around offense, which Riley forced his team to watch on videotape, and their soft defense.

Abdul-Jabbar scored only 13 points and made just 4 of 16 shots before he was ejected after picking up his second technical foul for fighting with Denver’s Danny Schayes.

While Abdul-Jabbar was struggling in Game 2, so was Johnson. He also scored only 13 points, none in the second half.

“It was like we had five guys with brain locks out there,” Riley said. “Usually, there is only one guy out to lunch, but we had five. We were running UCLA’s offense, Michigan State’s offense, Arizona State’s offense, everyone’s but ours, it seemed.”

The Nuggets, who were clearly running their own, got back into the series on the strength of Alex English’s 40 points, plus a couple of vital substitutions by Coach Doug Moe, who started Dan Issel at center and Elston Turner at point guard.

Moe, who said that the Nuggets’ only chance in the series was to get the games wild enough so something good could happen, got the type of game he was looking for.

Denver now has the home-court advantage in the series with three of the next five games at McNichols, but the Lakers swept the two-game regular-season series in Denver.

Laker Notes Denver center Dan Issel, who injured his right knee in Game 2, should be all right for Game 3. The Nuggets are hopeful that guard Lafayette (Fat) Lever, who is recovering from an arthroscopic examination of his right knee, can play in one of the two games here. . . . Both games are sellouts of 17,022.