Lakers May Be Feeling Dejected, but Rejected Is What It Really Was

Something funny must have happened to the Lakers on their way to the Forum.

Flying saucers over Inglewood.

Smog. Acid rain. Nuclear fallout.

Bad lunch.

Something.

Something made them play the way they did in Tuesday night’s NBA playoff game, won by the Houston Rockets, 112-102.

Maybe they all got sunburned at the beach on their day off from practice.

Maybe they all caught Michael Cooper’s skin rash.

Maybe they all caught whatever it was Kurt Rambis had, which seemed to be some sort of flu. Whatever was wrong, the Lakers just didn’t have it this time.

They were a little slow. Their shots were a little off. Sometimes they dribbled the ball and sometimes the ball dribbled out of their hands.

And shots were whacked back in their faces. Lots of shots.

If Akeem Olajuwon wasn’t swatting one over where John McEnroe and Tatum O’Neal were sitting, Ralph Sampson was blocking one over where Al Davis and John Robinson were sitting.

“They blocked so many shots that at one point I thought they dropped someone out of the roof,” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar said.

There were 12 Rocket blocks, eight of them in the first half. Even Abdul-Jabbar got his skyhook rejected, which is sort of like seeing Edwin Moses lose a hurdles race.

This is how the Team of Akeem creamed the Team of Kareem.

“Blocked shots beat us,” Abdul-Jabbar conceded afterward.

So did some new defensive strategy by the visitors, whose so-called “Twin Towers” couldn’t have stopped Abdul-Jabbar on Saturday with stepladders.

“We dropped a guard in Kareem’s lap and distracted him all night,” the mighty Sampson said. “I think that did the trick.”

You could say the Rockets came to Game 2 prepared to play.

Except they didn’t. They didn’t come to Game 2 to play until Period 2.

If ever a basketball team suffered through a miserable opening period, it was Houston, Tuesday night. For a while there, bets were being taken in the crowd on when--or if--the Rockets would score.

Asked after losing Saturday if he would do anything different in Game 2, Coach Bill Fitch said: “We’re going to do everything different.” Sounded like a good idea at the time.

But while watching the Rockets in the first quarter Tuesday, eyewitnesses wondered if Fitch’s new strategy was to make the Lakers think they didn’t know a skyhook from a hole in the ground.

With the game 3 minutes 42 seconds old, the Rockets finally scored a point. They were comical.

One minute, Sampson was kicking the ball like an NFL placekicker. Next minute, Olajuwon, trying to pick up a ball off the floor, squirted it through his legs like an NFL center. Possibly they were auditioning for Davis and Robinson.

By the time the quarter ended--perfectly, with Jim Petersen of the Rockets botching a layup--the Laker opponents had rolled up 18 points, putting them on an exciting 72 pace for the evening. It was the Quarter of the Living Dead.

But the Lakers, who scored only two points in the first three minutes themselves--a very funny two points at that, Abdul-Jabbar banking a hook from the lane--were determined to prove that as far as bad basketball was concerned, two could play at this game.

They went on to miss 50 of 90 shots for the game. They went on to get outrebounded by 13. They went on to commit crazy turnovers and do crazy things--like Petur Gudmundsson, of all people, getting a technical foul.

Even Chick Hearn, the optimistic Laker announcer, had noticed something seriously wrong in the second half. “The Lakers look very sluggish,” Chickie Baby said, “and the Rockets look very unsluggish.”

Maybe the Lakers were feeling just plain lousy. Cooper had missed practice Monday due to allergic dermatitis, a skin rash, and Rambis felt terrible all day Tuesday.

Both played, but they scored only five points apiece.

“I think we may have been a little lackadaisical out there,” Cooper said of the Lakers as a team.

Which is a bad thing to be on a night when the other team is unsluggish.