Lakers Rout Warriors, Go to the Videotape

Pat Riley, whose antenna is always tuned to possible motivational material, wasn’t tuned in to CBS Sunday afternoon--he was busy (so to speak) coaching the Lakers to a 136-100 regular-season ending win over the Golden State Warriors.

But for a little added inspiration for his team’s bid to become the first National Basketball Assn. team in 19 seasons to repeat as champions, Riley might want to review a tape of the round-table discussion aired on CBS Sunday afternoon, in which none of the network’s expert commentators picked the Lakers to win.

Tom Heinsohn (no surprise) picked Boston. So did Billy Cunningham and Billy Packer. Hubie Brown likes Detroit. And they all raised reservations about the Lakers’ ability to get out of the Western Conference, with the likes of Denver and Portland receiving prominent mention.

How’s that for being impressed by the Lakers’ 62-20 regular-season record, the best in the league, their 36-5 home record, which matched the Celtics as a league best, their 26-15 road record, by far the best?

Riley is not one to pass up a possible slight, and he admitted that he heard about the CBS poll even before the team got back to the locker room after beating the Warriors with 18 unanswered points in the first quarter. “Somebody told me,” Riley said coyly. “It always gets back to me.”

Riley also mentioned it to the team. He’s the one, remember, who personally guaranteed a Laker repeat within minutes of winning the championship last June. That theme has been picked up in a popular-selling T-shirt at the Forum, which reads “Repeat” with “Guaranteed” stamped across the front. So what did he think of the respect expressed by the network of the NBA?

“That’s OK,” Riley said. “People are basing their opinions on history. We don’t have anything to lose this year. Nothing. The only thing we have to lose is an opportunity. It’s a great opportunity, one that took us eight years to get.”

And should the Lakers fail to cash in on that opportunity?

“There are no consequences,” Riley said. “None. They won’t lose respect, their identities, their money, their rings, their pride, if they don’t get the job done. This is just about taking advantage of a great opportunity. And they’ll never have it again. Not as a group.

“When we embark on trying to win 15 more games, that’s what it’s all about. . . . We don’t need any artificial motivation, but I think this (the CBS poll) is something that will unify the team even more.”

Besides, Magic Johnson pointed out, it has always been that way since he has been a Laker.

“We’ve won four times and we haven’t been picked to win it in one of those years,” Johnson said. “We make our own way. We don’t need any favors.

“Whatever we get (in terms of respect), we’ve got to earn it. I like it better that way.”

Byron Scott, who finished off his finest season as a Laker with 20 points in 18 minutes, was bemused by the Lakers’ television dust-off.

“Boston got three of the four picks?” he said. “Great. We like it when the odds are all against us. It just adds fuel for us, gets us fired up, and makes us want to win even more.

“When everyone’s against us, it brings the group tighter and closer.”

The real deal, as James Worthy calls the playoffs, begins for the Lakers here Friday, when they meet San Antonio in the opener of their best-of-five series. Since the league expanded the playoffs to 16 teams in 1984, the Lakers haven’t lost a game in the first round. They’ve won 12 in a row, and when they eliminated the Spurs in 1986, they won by an average margin of 31.7 points, biggest in NBA playoff history.

But there are developments worth reviewing in the regular season, most notably the emergence of Scott, who had a breakthrough game against the Celtics in Boston, scoring 23 points in a win in the Garden, and underscored that game with a 38-point performance, his season high, against the Celtics in the Forum.

Scott, who is eligible to become a free agent after this season, staked out a resounding claim to stardom after being overshadowed by his teammates in his first four seasons. He led the Lakers in scoring with a 21.7 scoring average and shot a career-best 52.7%, compared with 48.9% last season.

There were other benchmarks: The 9-game winning streak to start the season; a 15-game winning streak that began with Magic Johnson’s improbable off-balance game-winning shot in Boston; the 38-4 stretch that included a remarkable February sweep--wins over Boston, Detroit, Houston and Atlanta; the win over the Hawks featuring a comeback from 16 points down on the road fueled by Worthy’s career-high 38 points.

On the downside, there was the end of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s consecutive-game streak of scoring in double figures at 787. Abdul-Jabbar had 14 games in which he scored in single digits, and his average dropped three points to a career-low 14.6, fourth best on the team. But Abdul-Jabbar, 41, showed enough evidence that he can summon his incomparable skyhook when needed--his six straight skyhooks down the stretch against Pat Ewing and the New York Knicks rank as one of the most compelling individual highlights--that it would be silly to understate his value in the playoffs.

There were also the injuries to the previously nigh-indestructible Michael Cooper, Worthy and Johnson, who probably won’t repeat as most valuable player but whose groin injury reduced the Lakers to a .500 team for a 20-game stretch that began last month.

Johnson, and the Lakers, appear to be hitting on all cylinders now. If so, they’ll have plenty of air time on CBS and WTBS to offer a convincing rebuttal.

“I don’t think anyone should underestimate this team,” Riley said. “They smell it.

“There’s nothing preordained. Nothing is guaranteed. There’s no such thing as a team of destiny. It’s up to them.”

Laker Notes

Only Kurt Rambis, who played 30 minutes, saw much action among the Laker starters Sunday. James Worthy played eight minutes, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar eight minutes (in which he was 4 of 4 from the floor). Johnson 11 (2 points, 7 assists) and Scott 18. Tony Campbell led the Lakers with 28 points, putting up 20 shots. Mike Smrek and A.C. Green had 12 apiece, with Smrek also blocking three shots. . . . Green was the only Laker to play in all 82 games this season, the second time he has done so in three seasons. . . . The winner of the Laker-San Antonio playoff series will play the winner of the Portland-Utah series. . . . The Lakers set a club home-attendance record of 714,477 this season, an average of 17,426. They sold out their last 30 home games to a capacity of 17,505. The Lakers will take today off, then go to Santa Barbara for three days of work at Westmont College. All workouts will be closed to the public. The Lakers will have an announcement about playoff ticket availability later in the week.