It’s Time to Look Ahead : Riley Says Complacency Led to Lakers’ Loss, and Something Has to Be Done About It

Riley, seeking to escape the sun, found relief under a shady tree at Cal Lutheran University. There, he conducted a TV interview and signed a few autographs.

But the Laker coach couldn’t escape the question. It’s posed differently, phrased differently, but it’s always there and it always amounts to the same thing: What happened?

How did the Lakers, in the NBA final series for four straight years and five out of six in the 1980s, get knocked out in the Western Conference final in 1986 by losing a shocking four straight to the Houston Rockets after having won the series opener?

It is summertime at Cal Lutheran, but for Riley, on hand for his five-day basketball camp for youngsters, it is a summer of discontent.

“Sure, there are a lot of questions,” Riley said, while awaiting the start of an afternoon session. “A lot of people out there want to know what happened. Well it doesn’t matter. It’s not that I don’t care, but it doesn’t matter any longer. The Rockets played harder and longer than we did. It happens. Now we have to correct that.

“Our problem was, we suffered from complacency during the regular season. It’s a disease, an insidious disease. Some of the players take the attitude that they’ll wait until the playoffs to get it going.

“When you take that attitude, you’re setting yourself up for a failure. If you are going to be mediocre for many months, you are going to be mediocre when it counts. The players have conned themselves for too long that the regular season is too tiresome, that they have to save themselves for the playoffs.

“They have to get that out of their minds and come back with a clean attitude. You learn nothing from success. You learn from failure.”

Riley knew his team was in trouble well before they stumbled off the cliff and into the abyss of early elimination. It was a Monday in May. The team, pushed by the Dallas Mavericks in the conference semifinals, emerged the winners after six games and kept right on fast-breaking, blowing past the Rockets on a Saturday in Game 1 of the conference final.

Then came blue Monday.

“For some reason, we went flat as a drum,” Riley said. “That Monday we had one of the worst practices I’ve ever seen. And Tuesday’s wasn’t much better. The players saw it. I could sense they were trying to kick themselves out of it, but they never could.

“I chewed them out, told them they were complacent. I told them, ‘We are assuming we are going to be in the finals because we won Saturday.’ That’s life in the fast lane. The difference between winning and losing is attitude.”

The Lakers soared to a 14-point second-quarter lead in Game 2, then seemed to burn out, a spent team falling with a thud unheard of in the seven-year period during which the careers of Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar overlapped.

The Lakers lost that game and the next three. They had lost four in a row to the Philadelphia 76ers in the 1983 NBA final, but they had three key people--James Worthy, Norm Nixon and Bob McAdoo--injured then. They lost to Houston in the 1981 playoffs, but Johnson was coming off a serious knee injury. There were no such excuses this time.

Was this just a four-game slump? Or have time and the Rockets finally passed the Lakers?

“I still think we’re the best team in the West,” Riley said. “We can beat those guys. We had beaten them 22 of the last 25 (before the four-game debacle).”

That said, though, Riley turned around and admitted that times might have changed.

“We’ve always been one step ahead of the posse,” he said. “Maybe now we’ve been caught. We no longer have a margin for error. The question is, what are we going to do about it? We can’t let it fragment us as it has so many other teams.

“Or maybe we have gotten all we can out of this team. Maybe this team has suffered a core burnout. That possibility has to be faced. I’m going to give the players a chance to disprove that.

“I think the chemistry is still there. I think the intelligence is still there. The question is, are the players going to look for an excuse that they’re suffering from burnout? If that attitude prevails, then we are going to have to do some things. If it doesn’t happen this year, there’ll be some changes. It’s time.”

Riley said that the Lakers have already explored some possibilities. There was talk with the Mavericks of a possible trade involving Worthy and Dallas forward Mark Aguirre. There were other talks involving Laker starters. And there may be still others.

The Lakers will head into the season trying to battle Houston Twin Towers Ralph Sampson and Akeem Olajuwon with Abdul-Jabbar, a man who will be 40 by playoff time, and retired, the Laker center says, the day after the season ends.

“There are now Twin Towers all over the league,” Riley said. “Petur (Gudmundsson, Laker backup center) is going to be used more, but we have to realize we can’t just go out and pick up another center off the streets. There should not be any player on our team who feels he is above being mentioned in a trade.”

Even Magic?

“Yes. If there is such a thing as an untouchable on our team, it would be Magic with his talent and entertainment value, but, hey, even Wilt (Chamberlain) was traded. It happens to everybody. It might happen to Earvin five years from now. Or to Larry Bird.

“These guys have got to realize that when they are talking about multimillion-dollar contracts, they are talking business. And when we discuss our need to get a center, we are talking business. It’s mutual trust and loyalty.

“Just because your name pops up in a trade, you have to understand this is part of your profession. You can’t be sensitive. If you are, you’re not a true professional. That doesn’t mean you should be callous or cynical about it, but you have to accept it.

“It doesn’t make any difference what happens. What matters is how you take it. It doesn’t matter that we lost to Houston. That’s over with. The question is, how are we going to take it? It doesn’t matter that we discussed James Worthy’s name in a trade. The question is, how will he take it? We don’t want to trade a James Worthy, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t discussed.”

But the Lakers must be very careful about what they discuss, Riley said.

“This is a critical part of the history of this team. After 1973, when Wilt left and Jerry West retired, the Lakers went through a real dry spell. They started to trade people and they went right to the bottom with that mentality. It’s critical that we do not take drastic foolish action and get an average center in exchange for our talented young players.

“Fans are going to have to have patience. After all the years of success, we may not be a championship team in the future. We’ll be a quality team that might win 45-50 games a year after Kareem leaves, but we are probably not going to reach the finals all the time. Getting to the Western Conference finals might be a good year for us. People are going to have to understand that.”

For the immediate future, however, the Lakers have one more year with Abdul-Jabbar and that may be a motivating force.

“The players may dedicate themselves to seeing that Kareem goes out with horns blowing if this is his last year,” Riley said.

If?

“I always leave an opening.”

As Riley talked, a passer-by asked if he was at Cal Lutheran to resume his football career. The Dallas Cowboys’ training camp is on campus. Riley was drafted by the Cowboys at the University of Kentucky, although he hadn’t played any college football, but chose to stick with basketball.

“Tell (Dallas Coach Tom) Landry I can still throw the ball 70 yards,” Riley said. “I throw a tight spiral.”

He laughed, knowing that any thoughts of further glory on the field have been killed by the passage of time.

Could the same be said for his team? That is the question.

Laker Notes From his basketball camp at Cal Lutheran, Pat Riley took a shot a drug abuse and had it swatted right back into his face by the NBA. . . . Riley’s idea was to step forward, followed by his coaches and players, and voluntarily undergo drug testing.

“The league has a great drug program, one of the very best,” he said. “But in light of what has happened to Len Bias and Don Rogers and Micheal Ray Richardson and John Lucas and others, it’s time to do something dramatic. . . . The rest of the players are guilty by association. Don’t judge everybody by the actions of a few. When you think of the number of players who are clean and have nothing to hide, I say let’s take a urine test and show everybody we are clean. I’m confident if all 12 members of my team took the test, all 12 would pass. We’re clean. The L.A. Lakers are not afraid. We are not going to hide behind a veil of privacy.”

Riley said that the plan was his alone and had not yet been cleared with Laker owner Jerry Buss. It doesn’t appear that Buss will even get a chance to do so. . . . “He can’t do it,” league spokesman Brian McIntyre said from New York when told of Riley’s proposal. “It would be in violation of the drug agreement between the players’ association and management. We’ve got a good drug program and the players were instrumental in getting it. A lot of the credit has to go to them. We have a model drug program.”