NBA PLAYOFF PREVIEWS : Western Conference : Except Lakers, There Is No Clear Choice

Some, such as Pat Riley, called it defeatist. Denver Nuggets Coach Doug Moe just shrugged and called it the truth.

If the National Basketball Assn. was looking for a patron saint of lost causes last season, Moe wasn’t volunteering. He came right out and said flatly that the Nuggets had no chance against the Lakers in the playoffs. The Nuggets might as well have adopted Benoit Benjamin’s uniform number: zero, zip. And the rest of the league, Moe said, faced about the same odds against the Lakers.

Moe was right, of course, which tickled him almost as much as the aggravation he caused his coaching opposite with the Lakers. It also earned him the right to be taken seriously when asked about the Western Conference playoffs this time around. At least with Moe, you know you’re not getting Larry Speakes.

And the word from Moe is this: Even though the Nuggets have gone from a sub-.500 team to the second-best record in the conference, improving by 17 games in the standings to 54-28, and Portland has coped beautifully with injuries that would have crippled other teams, and Dallas can be dangerous, Seattle sneaky and Utah unpredictable, the Lakers should still lord it over everybody else.

And that, Moe says, includes Boston, should the Lakers and Celtics stage their annual meeting in the final series.

“Boston has an outside shot,” Moe said Monday. “But they don’t have any more shot than we do. The Lakers are just a much better team than they are.”

The Nuggets flashed the league’s best finishing kick down the stretch, winning 16 of their last 18 games to blow past Dallas and Portland in the conference standings. Included in that run were victories over the Lakers in both Los Angeles and Denver.

“We’re playing terrific,” said Moe, who probably will beat out Riley in coach-of-the-year balloting, even though he has pledged to call any writer who votes for him a jerk.

“But the Lakers are still--by far--the better team. Basically, I think we can give anyone a run for their money, but we can be beaten by anybody. The Lakers are so far and away the class team.

“In order for anyone to have a good, realistic chance of beating them, they’d have to run into injuries. If Magic (Johnson) gets hurt, they’ve proven they’re vulnerable if he goes down.

“But right now, they’re reasonably healthy--everybody in the league is playing with aches and pains and minor hurts. If a guy can play, he’s OK. The Lakers have been fortunate to have so many people so healthy the last two years. They’ll probably go into the playoffs as healthy as anyone.”

If the Lakers seem a lock to emerge as conference champions, the uncertainty comes in determining which team will offer a challenge. Except for the Laker-San Antonio pairing, none of the first-round matchups offer a clear favorite.

“Portland, Dallas and us have the home court, but we’re only a little better than Utah, Houston and Seattle,” Moe said. “There’s not that significant a difference. Anyone can beat anyone else.

“We’d just like to reach the Lakers.”

The Nuggets will play the Seattle SuperSonics, who are so desperate to win in Denver--where they haven’t won a game since 1985--that they brought along respirators to cope with the thin air last week.

It didn’t help. Denver took the regular-season series, 4 games to 1.

But ask the Dallas Mavericks about the value of regular-season records. The Mavericks easily beat the SuperSonics five straight times last season, only to be shocked by Seattle in the first round, 3 games to 1.

“(The SuperSonics) will attack Denver with their defense,” said Riley, when asked his assessment of the Western matchups. “They’re maniacal with it. Whoever plays the most consistent, sound defense will win.

“Seattle is one of the great rebounding teams in the league, one of the great offensive rebounding teams. Denver is one of the worst. Both teams will score a lot of points, but it will come down to defense.”

According to Moe, the Nuggets have a good chance to take out the SuperSonics, especially with Michael Adams blending in so well with Denver’s perpetual-motion offense and Lafayette (Fat) Lever racking up triple-doubles at a rate second only to Magic Johnson’s. Moe just wishes he could shake the feeling that Denver could just as easily be bumped off.

“Everything’s going great right now,” he said. “We just have to keep it going. We have real good chemistry, we’re pretty deep, we’re getting help from a lot of people, we’ve got a lot of guys who can play 40-something minutes if they have to, and we’re very versatile. We can go so many different ways.

“The Lakers faltered a little bit when Magic got hurt, and people wrote them off. That was totally the dumbest thing. People don’t know how good the Lakers are.”

By the same token, how good are the Trail Blazers? They survived another year without Sam Bowie, the retirement of Kenny Carr and serious injuries to Kiki Vandeweghe and Steve Johnson to go 53-29. They should beat the Jazz--they won the season series, 4-1, and Clyde Drexler tore them up for 30.7 points a game.

But what happens, as Riley pointed out, if Portland center Kevin Duckworth, whose strong play has been a revelation, gets into foul trouble? How does Caldwell Jones handle the pounding he’ll be sure to get from 7-foot 4-inch Mark Eaton and his nearly 300-pound backup, Mel Turpin?

And who on the Trail Blazers proposes to stop the Mailman, Karl Malone, who finished the season in jaw-dropping fashion. In his last eight games, the Jazz power forward averaged 36.9 points--he had a high of 41, a low of 31--and 14.9 rebounds while playing 44 minutes a game?

“If there’s one team I’d rather not meet, it’s Utah,” said Riley, whose team will play the Portland-Utah winner in the second round, assuming it dispenses with the Spurs.

“For only one reason, because we’d have to play there. Our guys have a hard time there--and some of my greatest moments have come there.”

Riley was referring to two of his more noted addresses, delivered after Laker losses to the Jazz at a pitch that could be heard down the street at the Mormon Tabernacle. But it was also in Utah that the Lakers held the Jazz scoreless in the last 4-plus minutes of a game while scoring 15 points to win.

“It’s the altitude, even more so than in Denver,” Riley said, explaining the Lakers’ distaste for Utah. “And Eaton sort of wears on Kareem (Abdul-Jabbar).”

The other first-round series is a pairing of the conference’s biggest disappointments: Houston and Dallas.

The Rockets appear to be in no shape to challenge anyone for a title, other than in an intramural boxing tournament. Trading Ralph Sampson was hardly the solution to all of their problems.

A first-round ouster by the Mavericks would probably succeed in removing Coach Bill Fitch from the scene. How can any team with Akeem Olajuwon be such a mess? Guess in whose face the fingers are pointed.

The Mavericks, meanwhile, did their coach-switching last season, when Dick Motta abruptly stepped down after the Seattle fiasco and John MacLeod was imported from Phoenix.

That didn’t resolve the up-and-down play of Mark Aguirre, however, the all-star forward whose apparently indifferent play prompted a players-only meeting recently.

Dallas figures to take care of the Rockets, but even if the Mavericks should get past the second round, they have left little doubt they are not capable of competing with the Lakers.

“We’re just not as good a team as them,” center James Donaldson said after the Lakers breezed through town, 114-107, last week, even with an injured James Worthy. “It seems like every time they come in here, they want to prove a point to us.

” . . . We’re still a notch below them.”

And so, it would appear, is the rest of the West.