Lakers Call It Sad, Ugly, Depressing : Reactions to Suns’ Drug Indictments

For Michael Cooper, it was depressing. Magic Johnson called it sad. Pat Riley said it was ugly.

They weren’t talking about the Lakers’ 115-103 loss to the San Antonio Spurs Friday night, which ended the Lakers’ 11-game winning streak, their longest of the season.

That was just a meaningless game, No. 81 of an endless regular season. Even with the Lakers in arrears, Riley kept Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy and Johnson on the bench for the entire fourth quarter. The only reason he played them at all, Riley said, was for the benefit of the 12,872 ticket-holders here who had paid to see them play.

Any distress in the Laker dressing room after the game was not caused by the Spurs, who started four rookies and one out-of-position center (David Greenwood) Friday night, but by the Phoenix Suns, whose roster was ripped apart earlier in the day by revelations of drug use and grand-jury indictments.

Three current and two former Sun players were indicted on drug charges. A sixth, All-Star guard Walter Davis, was suspended and returned to a drug rehabilitation center.

“Very depressing,” said Cooper, who played in his 500th straight game Friday night, including playoffs.

“We are role models and have to live up to those roles, whether we like it or not. They (the Suns) know the rules, and they’ve got to play by them.

“It’s depressing because kids look up to guys like Walter Davis and James Edwards. You really can’t feel sorry for people like that, because they know the rules.”

Why hasn’t a similar scandal touched the Lakers who, after all, play in anything-goes La-La Land?

“Because we monitor each other,” Cooper said. “I monitor Magic, he monitors me, he monitors Kareem. And we’re not going to let anybody tear down what we’ve built up here.”

There was one occasion some years ago, Cooper said, when he and Johnson and Abdul-Jabbar all approached a player who they suspected of drug use. That player is no longer in the league.

“If we suspected one of us, the team would come to the rescue real fast,” Johnson said. “Nobody else is going to look out for you. If we don’t look out for each other, who is?

“On this team, it really is all for one and one for all. If something happens to one of us, it happens to all of us.”

Riley is not naive enough to believe that it could never happen to a team he’s coaching. That’s one reason he advocates spot testing as a means to control the drug problem.

“Obviously, the (Len) Bias thing, the (Don) Rogers thing, the banning of (Mitchell) Wiggins and (Lewis) Lloyd didn’t make a damn bit of difference,” Riley said.

“You have to believe in your players, you just have to. But when you breach that trust as a team, when you work to be on the same wavelength and some guys are just nodding their heads, living that life . . . it becomes a lie.”

Riley’s thoughts turned to John MacLeod, the long-time Phoenix coach who was fired last February.

“If this has been going on for two or three years, and he had three, four, five, a half-dozen players high out there,” Riley said, “they can’t be giving their best performance. But the coach is always the one who gets blamed for it.”

While the Lakers aren’t the team in trouble with the law, Cooper acknowledged that the Suns’ situation affects them as well.

“They set a standard for the NBA,” Cooper said. “The league thought when they banned two players early in the season, ‘hey, we’ve got it licked, we’re doing a good job.’

“But then, when a whole cast of characters comes down with the disease, that hurts.”

Laker Notes The Lakers may have gotten an early clue that this wasn’t to be their night when rookie Larry Krystkowiak swatted away Byron Scott’s layup attempt. The Lakers led by eight early, but the Spurs caught up by the quarter, 24-24, and took the lead for good, 36-34, on a three-pointer by Johnny Moore, who was 4-for-4 from three-point land. The Spurs led, 54-48, at the half, and the Lakers never got closer than four the rest of the way. David Greenwood led San Antonio with 23 points, while Walter Berry had 19. . . . Mychal Thompson, who started the season with the Spurs, led the Lakers with 20. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played just 19 minutes and scored 13 points. Magic Johnson, who said he had a sleepless night--the team flew out of Salt Lake City at 6 a.m.--had 17 points and 6 assists in 22 minutes. . . . The Lakers had won six straight on the road, where they are 28-13 overall. They had not lost since March 24 at Phoenix. . . . The Lakers will open the first round of the playoffs with games Thursday night (7:30) and Saturday afternoon (12:30) with the Denver Nuggets.