Lakers Get a New Flag, Seattle Helps Fold It : Western Title Comes Easily in 133-102 Win

Jerry Buss sat on a table in the Laker dressing room Monday afternoon, borrowed a match from Pat Riley, and lit a cigarette.

“Western Conference champions,” said the owner of the Lakers, shaking the hand of his coach. “Did you ever notice that Boston and us are the only teams that don’t hang the conference title flags in their arenas?”

Riley: “I understand why Boston doesn’t. They’ve got too many flags.”

Championship flags, that is. At the Boston Garden and Inglewood’s Forum, anything less is neatly folded and stuck in some closet alongside the towels.

Let others celebrate what the Lakers accomplished Monday, when Seattle ran up the white flag and surrendered, 133-102. It gave the Lakers a 4-0 sweep and their fifth National Basketball Assn. Western Conference championship in the last six seasons.

For Buss, after 65 regular-season wins and 11 wins in 12 playoff games, the past is merely prologue.

“Admission to the big tent,” he said. “That’s what this is.”

Let there be no doubt that Buss expects full value for the price of his ticket when the Lakers face either the Boston Celtics or Detroit Pistons in the NBA finals.

This will be the Lakers’ sixth trip to the finals since Buss bought the team. Three of those teams won it all.

This team, Buss said Monday, is better than any of them.

“Don’t write that,” Riley said, grimacing. “He’s just feeling good about himself.”

That may be true. But Buss was feeling even better about his team, which left the SuperSonics gasping in the trail of a purple-and-gold jet stream in the second quarter Monday. That’s when the Lakers ran off 13 straight points as part of a 19-3 burst that extended a 46-40 lead to 65-43 with 2:01 left in the first half.

“That second quarter was the best I’ve seen us play,” said Michael Cooper, who found it even more impressive than the 49-point, third-quarter explosion the Lakers had in the first game of the Golden State series.

“Magic (Johnson) and Byron (Scott) and I were talking about how this was the first time in a long time we’ve been caught up watching our fast break,” Cooper said.

“And if Magic Johnson is watching, you know something is going on that’s real exciting to watch.”

Buss, who sat directly behind the Laker bench, couldn’t have agreed more.

“I’ve never seen a team that I’ve had have as much confidence as this team has,” Buss said. “They’re so mentally together, and tough.

“They went out there and wanted the fourth game just as much as the first game. There were no doubts in anyone’s minds.”

The message Riley scrawled on the dressing-room blackboard might have had something to do with that.

“Don’t let up,” it read. “Sleepy.”

The reference was to the Golden State series, when the Lakers had a chance to close out the Warriors in four straight but instead got a 51-point comeuppance from Warrior guard Eric (Sleepy) Floyd.

Monday, the Lakers hit Seattle with a 39-point blast in the first quarter, and never let Seattle launch a counterattack. Dale Ellis made 1 of his first 8 shots, finished 5 for 18, and with just a dozen points.

For the series, Ellis shot just 38.4% (25 of 65) after almost single-handedly shooting down the Dallas Mavericks and Houston Rockets in the first two rounds of the playoffs.

“I had him anxious, I had him thinking,” said Scott, who matched Ellis’ footsteps sneaker-squeak for sneaker-squeak.

“He was wondering, ‘Where was I?’ ” Scott said.

“Said Cooper, who also blanketed Ellis: “He didn’t know he was playing against the best defensive players in the NBA. ‘Byron played him tough, and usually, when the starting guy plays you tough, a guy comes off the bench and you get a breather, but here I come.”

The other two-thirds of the Seattle scoring troika weren’t to be found much on Monday, either. Tom Chambers was 8 for 22 and scored 20 points Monday. Xavier McDaniel, who scored 42 on Saturday, was 7 for 20 and had 18 points.

As a team, the SuperSonics shot just 35.8%, were outrebounded by the Lakers, 51-49, and were outscored on the free-throw line, 44-25.

The Lakers, meanwhile, had 26 points and 8 rebounds from James Worthy, the leading scorer in the series. Magic Johnson had 21 points and 12 assists, A.C. Green 19 points and 13 rebounds, Scott 19 points, Kurt Rambis 14 and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar 13.

“I’m just ecstatic with how we played,” Riley said. “We came out alive, alert, we were running, and we moved the ball around as well as we had all series.”

The owner took his own ecstasy one huge step further.

“It’s very tough to compare, but I think this is my best team,” Buss said. “This one could beat the other ones.”

Mychal Thompson never played on any of those other teams, just against them. But he was inclined to agree with Buss.

“Nice to be complimented by the main man,” Thompson said. “The difference now is, before Kareem may have been too much of a one-man show. Now, when you play the Lakers, you don’t know where you’re going to be attacked.

“It’s like jungle warfare. You don’t know where the snipers are.”

Cooper said this was the quickest, deepest Laker team on which he’s played. He also said that it didn’t set well with the Lakers when so many predicted they were slowly sinking in the West after losing to Houston in the conference finals last spring.

“All we heard was how Houston was the new kid on the block,” Cooper said. “That made the hair on my neck stand up.

“I think you guys (reporters) mistook us for somebody else.”

Worthy, who is playing the best basketball of his life, hesitated to label this the best team for which he’s played. It was only last season, after all, that the Lakers were being called one of the best teams of all time.

“But this is one of the closest teams I’ve ever been on,” he said, “which is a central characteristic of this team. We constantly monitor each other. We added new faces to the old five and conjured some good chemistry.”

Just the right mix, Buss said, to beat Boston or Detroit. Can the Lakers lose to either team?

“I really don’t think so,” Buss said. “Boston is still Boston. They play on emotion, and they have the Garden and five great players. Detroit--I don’t think we’ve beaten them there in the last several years.

“I think it will be tight, a six or seven-game series. But when the marbles are there to be picked up, I think we’ll be the ones to pick them up.”

Talk like that, of course, is enough to turn Riley’s tan to ivory.

“Me, I’m the ultimate conservative,” he said. “You have to show me to make that kind of statement.

“Dr. Buss may firmly believe that. If he does, he’s the man.”

Scott said there was time to decide whether these Lakers are the best.

“Give me four more wins, then I’ll be able to tell you exactly how I feel,” Scott said.

In a couple of weeks, Riley, too, said he knows exactly how he’ll feel, too.

“There’s winning and there’s misery,” he said. “That’s the way it is.”

Laker Notes

Owner Jerry Buss, on which team he’d prefer the Lakers to play in the finals: “I wish we could play Boston 82 times a year.” . . . Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, on the Lakers’ desire to sign him for two more years, told reporters: “I haven’t made any commitments. I have to listen to them. It’s nice to know that they feel you still have something to give. Even though I’m not called on to do what I used to do, I’m still valuable to the team at center. We’d still be a very good team with me at center.” . . . Pat Riley on the possibility of Abdul-Jabbar returning: “He’s a man who’ll make his own decision. I don’t think he’d ever say never. If he’s performing well, and the team’s performing well, he may reconsider. But if he has said, that’s it, I’m going out on top, then he’ll go.” . . . Mychal Thompson, on Abdul-Jabbar: “Give him the Forum, give him (Mayor) Bradley’s job. Worthy’s great and Magic’s in a class by himself, but this team is the team that it is because of Kareem. Maybe if they take down the Hollywood sign and put up Kareem, he’ll stay.” . . . Thompson on going to the finals for the first time in his career: “It’s taken me nine long years.” Said Wes Matthews: “It’s taken me eight.” . . . When Frank Brady of the Herald-Examiner asked Thompson if he planned to dump a bucket of Gatorade on Riley if the Lakers win the title, he said: “With the clothes he wears? Who’s going to pay the dry cleaning bill? It’ll be a thousand dollars.” . . . Abdul-Jabbar had a run of 29 straight free throws broken when he missed in the third quarter Saturday. . . . Kurt Rambis, who did not play Saturday, made all five of his shots from the floor, all four of his free throws and had seven rebounds in 18 minutes Monday.