There’s No Way Warriors Can Win It

No living soul believes it is possible. Not me. Not you. Not Doug Moe. Not Dick Motta. Not Lionel Wilson. Not Bernie Bickerstaff. Not Fat Frank Layden. Not Dancing Barry. Not Little Elmo. Not Sleepy Floyd. Not Joe Dancing Barry Carroll. Not anybody.

No one thinks the Lakers can lose this playoff series.

Even if Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and James Worthy wear blindfolds instead of goggles. Even if Magic Johnson and Byron Scott take turns wearing Kurt Rambis’ glasses. Even if Michael Cooper and Mychal Thompson wear Jack Nicholson’s shades.

The Lakers could beat these guys if they opened the second half with a backcourt of Jerry West and Jerry Buss.

No one is prepared to say otherwise, even after the Golden State Warriors gave the Rusted State Lakers a hard time for a while in Tuesday night’s game at the Forum, won by the Lakers, 125-116.

Their golden jerseys trimmed with rust after five days off, the Lakers still took the opening game of this Western Conference series, just as they will soon take the closing game of this Western Conference series.

Go on, ask anybody.

Ask Doug Moe, the candid coach of the Denver Nuggets, who recently made Howard Cosell look like a piker when it came time to “tell it like it is.” Moe assured the world that he and the rest of his stooges had no chance of beating the Lakers, and he was correct.

Ask Moe if the Warriors can take the Lakers in a best-of-seven series and he probably will tell you: “They have two chances. None and none.”

Or maybe you could ask Dick Motta, the coach of the Dallas Mavericks, who earlier this season suggested that the Houston Rockets were deliberately throwing games. Ask Motta if the Lakers could lose this series and he probably would tell you: “Sure, if they did it on purpose. Well, maybe.”

You might get decent odds this morning if you placed a call to the office of Lionel Wilson, Mayor of Oakland, because the man has civic loyalty. But you can bet he wouldn’t bet Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley anything expensive. Wilson has about as much chance of seeing the Lakers lose to the Warriors as he does of seeing the Raiders move back.

Nobody honestly thinks the Warriors have a chance. They might be pulling for the Warriors. They might be lifelong fans of the Warriors. They might even be able to name three Warriors. But you can not find one human being from the Bay Area, including the drunks near the visiting dugout at Candlestick Park, who believes in his or her heart that Golden State has a good enough team.

You could ask around the rest of the country, too. Bernie Bickerstaff, who coaches the Seattle SuperSonics, would like to believe the Lakers can be beaten, now that it looks as though his Sonics will be advancing to the conference finals. Seattle leads the Houston Rockets two-zip.

But Bickerstaff is no dummy. He doesn’t expect the Lakers to lose. And neither does Frankie (Didn’t Go to Hollywood) Layden, the round mound of sound who runs the Utah Jazz. Impressed as he was with Golden State’s play in a recent playoff series against the Jazz, Layden would not wager a diet cola that the Warriors could beat the Lakers.

So, everybody just sat back as Tuesday’s game was about to begin and awaited the inevitable. The folks at the Forum watched the noted entertainer, Dancing Barry, and a singing group called Little Elmo and the Cosmos get the show on the road with the world’s most ridiculous rendition of the national anthem. And then they sat back and watched some ball, as Magic Johnson calls it. Not basketball. Just ball.

Well, as these things have been known to happen, the underdogs went right out and played some pretty splendid ball--for a while. Carroll, with 20 points in the first half alone, and guard Sleepy Floyd, with some fancy passing and long-distance shooting, helped the Warriors peel out to a seven-point lead by halftime.

And all of you out there in the viewing audience were real worried, right?

Yeah, right.

The Lakers came back out of the locker room, yawned a couple of times, then rattled off 49 third-quarter points. The Warriors ran around all over the place, trying to guard them. But it did them no good.

The only thing the Golden State Warriors can do to the Lakers is outhustle them. They cannot outshoot them, outboard them, outpass them or outlast them. There is no way the Warriors can beat the Lakers four times in a best-of-seven series. There is no way the Warriors can beat the Lakers four times in a best-of-77 series.

Laker Coach Pat Riley hates talk like this. He wants to make sure his players look sharp, feel sharp, be sharp. When Moe suggested that the Nuggets couldn’t have beaten Los Angeles if their lives depended on it, Riley got a little bit hot under his nicely starched collar and accused Moe of using psychological warfare.

Shoot, the Nuggets couldn’t have beaten the Lakers if they had used germ warfare.

OK, so the Lakers were a little sloppy Tuesday night. They were entitled to be, having had so much time off. You won’t always catch them guilty of so many traveling and three-second violations, and you won’t often see Byron Scott have so much trouble making three-point shots, unless maybe it’s against the Boston Celtics.

What ostensibly could happen is that the Warriors get hot or get lucky and take Thursday’s second game of the series. This, in turn, will get everybody all hot and bothered up in Oakland, and some of them will start to shoot off their mouths, making believe that the Warriors have the Lakers exactly where they want them.

All they would be doing is whistling into the wind. The Warriors could never have the Lakers where they want them. There are two places on Earth where they particularly do not want them--one of them being the Forum, and the other one being their arena in Oakland.

This series is over, 1-0.

Bring on the next victim.