Lakers See Films of the Horror : Magic Says Riley Is Very Displeased; Riley Says Not Quite

The Lakers watched a movie together Monday morning, but they didn’t have to see Siskel and Ebert for a review.

All they had to do was look at Pat Riley, who gave two thumbs down to this gory feature, shot on location Sunday in Boston Garden: “Celtics Out of the Crypt,” starring Larry Bird and Dennis Johnson, with Greg Kite as Igor and Jack Nicholson in a cameo role.

“He was harsh-- real bad,” Magic Johnson said of the Laker coach, who gave his team a free screening of their 109-103 loss to the Boston Celtics in Game 3 of the National Basketball Assn. finals.

“We deserved it, too,” Johnson said. “We deserved it.”

Riley said he wasn’t that bad. After all, he wouldn’t put this on his list of the 10 worst flicks of all time. It certainly didn’t rate with that 1985 horror classic, Celtics 148, Lakers 114, Game 1, NBA finals, after which Riley carved up Kareem Abdul-Jabbar like Pauline Kael doing a number on Sylvester Stallone.

Sunday’s game checked in on the low end of the Riley scale of 1 to 10, but he said there was no need for him to add an acerbic narration to the images on the screen.

“My voice level did not go up,” Riley said Monday at the Garden, where the Lakers and Celtics practiced for tonight’s Game 4 (Channel 2, 6 p.m.), with the Lakers leading the series, two games to one.

“I was just factual, and definitive. Sometimes you have to show these guys to convince them. But I don’t have to scream at them now.

“They (the Celtics) played great, and we played poorly.”

Even so, Riley actually saw some things he liked.

“I wasn’t disappointed by our effort and push,” he said. “We just weren’t efficient.

“In L.A., it was so easy for us to score and get good shots, we might have decided, ‘OK, we can be frivolous with some of our shots, especially in our transition game.’ ”

Riley dismissed the idea that the Celtics circumvented the Laker fast break.

“We didn’t have our whirling-dervish, dunking fast break going, so people say we didn’t have our fast break,” he said. “But we scored 30 times off our transition. That’s 60 points.”

Where the Lakers came up short, he said, was not on the floor boards, but on the backboards, where they were out-rebounded Sunday--17-8 on the offensive boards--and 91-65 in the last two games.

“We can’t win if we get out-rebounded,” Riley said. “The Boston Celtics were 23rd (last) in the league in offensive rebounding, but they’re probably the best rebounding team in basketball when they’re determined to rebound.

“We better get ready for a war.”

The Celtics, meanwhile, arrived to the beat of a different drummer Monday after being pounded twice in Los Angeles.

“When you’re lying down and somebody’s kicking you, there’s nothing to say other than ‘Stop,’ ” Celtic forward Kevin McHale said.

“(But) even in the two games in L.A., I thought the Lakers were very beatable--in a certain type of game.

“They’re the best front-running team in the world. They can turn a 10-point lead into a 25-point lead so fast, it’ll make your head spin.

“They come at you in spurts--10-2, 8-1. But if we get ahead, we can play our style of game.”

There were few spurts for the Lakers Sunday. They scored consecutive baskets only three times in the last three quarters.

McHale, for one, expects the Lakers to turn up the pace again tonight.

“It’s the nature of the beast to run,” he said. “And they’re going to run like hell.

“We hit the boards hard, made a more concerted effort on defense, forced them to take more outside shots instead of dunks. We’ll find out if that works again (tonight).

“They’re going to play better. We’d better play better, too.”

The Lakers, for their part, don’t want to see any more B movies. Last weekend, Magic Johnson and a couple of teammates went to see “The Untouchables.”

And whom did Johnson relate more to, Eliot Ness or Al Capone?

“I guess I have a little of both of them in me,” Johnson said. “Both of ‘em are the fiery type. And both of ‘em take no stuff.

“But I guess I was more like Eliot at the end, because he ended up winning.”