On a Stormy Night in L.A., Lakers Pour It On Hawks

As far as the poor Atlanta Hawks were concerned, Friday might just as well have been another rainy night in Georgia.

The Hawks came to usually sunny Los Angeles to play the Lakers in a National Basketball Assn. game, then promptly got hit by the worst rainstorm in many months here, and by a Laker team that, playing before a sellout crowd of 17,505 at the Forum, simply defied adjectives. Sensational. Superb. Awesome. Take your pick.

It all added up to a 141-117 drubbing of an Atlanta team that, at least for a half, played quite well. “I don’t know what you say after one like this,” said Mike Fratello, the Hawks’ coach. “It’s a little like sending your horses into the Kentucky Derby. All of a sudden, you see what the real class of the field is like.”

Pat Riley, the man who coaches those Laker thoroughbreds, agreed with the horse-race imagery for this one.

“We had great ball movement tonight,” he said. “We got it out and ran. Against a team like the Hawks, who are willing to run, it’s just a matter of who cracks first.”

No doubt about it. The Hawks were the ones with tongues hanging out afterward.

The Lakers’ impressive win was particularly well timed, since the Boston Celtics come to town Sunday for their only regular-season appearance at the Forum.

The Celtics beat Portland in overtime Friday night, 120-119, and Larry Bird won the game with a late shot while totaling 47 points.

So, the stage is set for big guy against big guy. Imagine the drooling going on right now at CBS Sports, which will televise Sunday’s game. Bird is hot. Magic Johnson of the Lakers, out recently with a sore knee, had 18 points and 16 assists against the Hawks. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had a 25-point night. Kurt Rambis is playing power forward like Dick Butkus again, and Michael Cooper is playing his usual chewing gum defense and throwing in shots from the second balcony. A TV network’s dream. The Lakers will enter the game with a 39-12 record, second in the league behind Boston’s 40-9. The way it looks now, the rest of the league is just there for window dressing this season.

Friday night, the main danger to the Lakers was that they might be looking past Atlanta toward Sunday.

“I was quite happy that we played in the present,” Riley said. “We weren’t looking forward. Atlanta is a lethal team, and they can explode on you at any time. But we never let them.”

The Lakers allowed the Hawks no more than one half of a close game. And that half was a good one, real playoff intensity, no chance to go get hot dogs and try to find out where Jack Nicholson was sitting before settling in for the stretch run. No, this one was a keeper right from the start.

It was 71-67 at the half, and still 85-80 with just under 7 minutes to play in the third period. But the Lakers, after a timeout, turned it on with spurts of 18-5 and 32-9. From neck-and-neck, you suddenly had Secretariat running away from the field.

The Lakers matched their season scoring average of 119 points, a category in which they lead the league, with 9:45 left. They came within three points of equaling their biggest scoring output of the season.

The real burial occurred at 105-89, when Cooper, after spectacularly rejecting a shot by the Hawks’ spectacular Dominique Wilkins, sped downcourt, took a pass and tossed in a three-point basket. Quickly, the Hawks lost possession, and Magic Johnson dished off to Cooper, who again tossed in a three-pointer.

That made it 111-89, and those in the crowd hoping to make an early exit because of the terrible weather, had their wish.

Glenn (Doc) Rivers, Hawk guard, looked like a man who had just faced the invasion of Normandy when he said afterward: “The Lakers were awesome. That’s the best team I’ve seen this year.

As good as the Lakers were, however, they weren’t the whole show. Stealing a lot of the thunder of the evening was 5-7 Anthony (Spud) Webb, who came to the neighborhood of Disneyland and, for a while Friday night, made it look as if the NBA could be a small world, after all.

Webb, fresh from his All-Star slam-dunk contest victory, scored 13 points in 17 minutes, second only to Wilkins’ 29, and had a run of 9 points, 2 assists and 1 rebound in the second period that contributed greatly to the Hawks’ staying with the Lakers. “Spud’s a real inspiration to all those people out there under 6 feet,” Rivers said. “They all think they can’t play because they are too small. Well, Spud can play. He’s a real NBA player.”

He’s also, in this game of giants, incredibly tiny. He weighs just 135 pounds, or about as much as William Perry’s right thigh. He looks like somebody ought to put him in a stroller and take him somewhere for ice cream.

Among the more memorable moments Friday night was one when Webb banged into Maurice Lucas on a drive, and Lucas looked like he wasn’t sure he’d been hit. And then there was Mitch Kupchak, setting a pick that Webb ran into, chin into belly button.

The Lakers’ Mike McGee had a wonderfully nonsensical summary of what it is like to play against the NBA’s littlest Indian.

“He’s really hard to guard,” McGee said, “because he’s so little and that puts him so close to the floor.”

Laker Notes It was just your average night at the Forum. Tennis star John McEnroe, dressed in tennis shoes (what else?), red pants and shades, sat courtside with his fiancee, Tatum O’Neal. And midway through the second period, an enterprising young man proposed to one of the Laker Girls by putting the question on the scoreboard and then presenting her with flowers courtside after she and the group finished one of their routines. Is it like this in Cleveland?. . . . Kurt Rambis had five rebounds in the first 3 minutes 40 seconds of the game, three of them because of outstanding hustle on the offensive boards. . . . The fans came early for this one, and the object of their affection was 5-7 Spud Webb, who teased them for a while and then did a couple of triple pump dunks.