Lakers Make It 10 Wins in a Row, Stop Suns’ Playoff Drive

They don’t like the label, but the Phoenix Suns rode in here Sunday night as outlaws, with a posse of grand juries and TV mini-cams in hot pursuit.

The hanging judge is back home in Phoenix, where the Suns reportedly are the target of a drug probe with hints of a gambling connection--although NBA Commissioner David Stern himself has denied the gambling allegations. In the midst of all that, the Suns are trying to sneak into the playoffs.

By contrast, of course, the Lakers are something less than desperadoes. But that didn’t keep them from showing up Sunday night as the James gang in a 119-104 win over Phoenix that gave the Lakers their 10th straight win before a sellout crowd of 17,505 in the Forum.

Who was that masked man leading the Lakers? Try the begoggled James Worthy, who scored 20 points in the first half alone, 26 in the game, to keep the Lakers unbeaten in their last 15 games at home. Worthy also had 9 rebounds and 4 assists.

Overall, the Lakers are now 64-15, a record surpassed by just six teams in NBA history. Wins in their last three games--road contests at Utah and San Antonio before closing out at home next Sunday against Seattle--would enable them to match Boston’s 67-15 record of last season.

The Suns, meanwhile, saw an end to their seven-game winning streak, their longest since 1980, despite some ungodly shooting by Walter Davis, who scored 32 points.

Worthy, who has scored 20 points or more in 15 of his last 20 games, had help from the usual suspects, especially after the Suns came back from a 98-81 deficit to close within three, 102-99, on a three-point play by Larry Nance with 4:43 left to go.

Back into the game came Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Worthy. Johnson, who scored 19 points and had 19 assists, scored on three of the Lakers’ next four possessions, fueling a 9-0 Laker run.

Johnson was fouled twice and also made a running hook, while Michael Cooper succeeded in cooling off Davis with his defense.

“What defense?” Laker Coach Pat Riley deadpanned. “I told Coop on the bench, ‘Now earn your money.’ The first thing Davis did was drive down the middle on him for a layup.

“We had to make some adjustments on Walter. We were giving him too much air space. Once he gets it going, forget it.”

As hot as Davis was, Worthy was even hotter in the first quarter, when he scored 14 points, most coming on an assortment of jams, finger-rolls and other high-wire acts.

The Suns, the last team to beat the Lakers--back on March 24, when Los Angeles had its worst shooting night of the season and made just 2-of-24 shots in the second quarter--stayed close, however, never trailing by more than seven in the first half.

At intermission, they trailed by just four, 58-54, but Byron Scott’s three-point basket started the Lakers on an 18-4 run that ended with Worthy jamming home a feed from Cooper that gave them their 17-point advantage with 10:22 to go.

With both teams playing reserves, the Lakers went more than three minutes without scoring while the Suns closed in, but when Riley went to the bench and summoned his starters, order was restored.

The embattled Suns should be so lucky, as a sympathetic Riley observed.

“That’s the ultimate peripheral opponent,” Riley said of the rumors surrounding the Suns.

“Obviously they’ve gained some strength from it. As Ray Charles would say, the good times make you fall apart, the bad times bring you together. They (the Suns) had a pretty good roll going.

“Some of their players over there are trying to prove that this may be just one horrendous rumor. Before they get down to the bottom of it, people shouldn’t make any assumptions.

“But it doesn’t look good.”

The Suns took a page out of the Laker playbook when they fired long-time coach John MacLeod at the end of February and replaced him with a guy out of the broadcast booth, Dick Van Arsdale.

Van Arsdale, when asked about the Laker defense Sunday, yielded no ground to Chick Hearn for expressing an opinion.

“Well, they play an awfully good zone,” he said. “Probably the best zone defense that I’ve seen in my 23 games (as coach).

“I wouldn’t take anything away from the Lakers, they’re a great team, but it’s a well-disguised zone.”