GAME 2 : Lakers Can’t Afford to Keep Celtic McHale at His Arm’s Length

Trying to pull even in the National Basketball Assn. championship series with the Boston Celtics, the Lakers have a big problem. He is 6-foot-10, wears green shoes and has 40-inch sleeves.

The problem is Kevin McHale, a player the Lakers respect so much that they double-team him. That usually works about as well as anything else, unless McHale quickly passes the ball back out to the Celtic shooters for a little target practice, which is what happened Monday in Game 1.

The Celtics shot holes in that piece of strategy, but it doesn’t mean the Lakers are going to change their defense a lot for Game 2 tonight in Boston Garden.

Coach Pat Riley knows he can’t leave McHale alone with a single Laker defender. Playing McHale one on one is exactly what the Celtics want, because Kurt Rambis just isn’t as tall as McHale.

McHale may have the long arms, but Riley has something up his sleeve, too. Riley has a plan for Rambis that might even things up a bit. “We’re going to hang Kurt by his thumbs and stretch him out a foot,” Riley said.

Clearly, Riley was stretching the point, but whatever the Lakers come up with, the way they handle McHale may be their most important adjustment coming back from a 148-114 blowout.

When the Lakers were double-teaming McHale, Celtic jump-shooters Danny Ainge and Scott Wedman were left unattended just long enough to bury their shots from the perimeter.

Laker assistant coach Dave Wohl said the defense used against McHale is sound in theory, even if it didn’t turn out well when it was put into practice. The Lakers got so far away from what they wanted to do, said Wohl, that they don’t know yet if their game plan is right or wrong.

“We didn’t even have a reasonable facsimile,” Wohl said. “We had nothing that even resembled how we want to play them. We can’t have panic set in after just one game.”

There’s much more time left for that.

“If they get hammered twice in a row, that would be demoralizing for them,” McHale said.

Before the Lakers junk their game plan, they will continue to double-team McHale and take their chances with Boston’s outside shooters. The Lakers believe that the Celtics cannot possibly duplicate the outside shooting they displayed Monday.

Wohl said the Lakers were slow in their defensive rotation, from double-teaming the ball when it went inside to going back to the outside when the ball was passed to the perimeter.

“If the rotation is slow, we’re in trouble,” he said. “We just couldn’t get there in time. Usually, we can get to the 18-20 foot range and put a hand in the shooters’ faces. But they went out an extra three or four feet from that. And if they can shoot the same way they did before, we’re really in trouble.”

Unless the Lakers win tonight, they will know what real trouble is. They would be down 0-2 and facing the ugly prospect of having to beat the Celtics four times in five games or else it’s over and out.

Matching up with McHale is not an easy thing to do. The Philadelphia 76ers tried something in the Eastern Conference finals when 6-11 center Moses Malone defended against McHale by himself, but that left 6-6 forward Charles Barkley to guard 7-0 Celtic center Robert Parish, and that just wasn’t a fair fight.

The Lakers copied the 76ers Monday, but only briefly. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar took a short turn against McHale and Rambis went against Parish.

“That’s part of our thinking,” Riley admitted, but he added that he has many more worries than individual matchups.

“We’re OK with our (double-team) concept,” he said. “I don’t think it’s as much changing things as it is keeping what we have and doing it right. After we got 25 points down, everything fell apart.”

What the Lakers are likely to do is go ahead and double-team McHale, but not so often. Celtic guard Dennis Johnson, who says his jump shot is “death from 15-feet on in,” believes that the Lakers will still double-team McHale just as much, but that they won’t do it as often with Larry Bird and Parish.

McHale knows that the Lakers have to come up with something.

“I’m sure I’ll probably see something a little different,” he said. “But who knows what they’re going to do? If they put one guy on me, well, that’s a philosophy that puts a lot of pressure on the defense. They’re not going to give me the chance to go one on one when I’m four feet from the basket to begin with.”

Of course the Celtics know all about double-teaming. That’s what they do with Abdul-Jabbar, reasoning that they’d rather take a chance with a 20-foot Laker jump shot than one of Abdul-Jabbar’s eight-foot hooks.

Celtic Coach K.C. Jones said it’s all a matter of forcing the other team to take a poorer shot.

“Doubling works,” he said. “Does it work on Kareem? It did in the first game. Doubling didn’t work too well for them, but I guarantee you, they’ll play the same defense on us again and hope we can’t hit the same way every night.”

After practice Wednesday, McHale sat in front of his stall in the Celtic locker room, eating a piece of carrot cake, a gift from a Celtic fan.

“Know what this proves?” McHale asked. “I can have my cake and eat it, too.”

The way McHale influences the Celtic offense, his meaning was crystal clear.