THE NBA CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES : LOS ANGELES LAKERS vs. DETROIT PISTONS : BACK BURNER : With People Such as Vinnie Johnson, Pistons Easily Bench Press Lakers

When Vinnie Johnson was growing up, he lived in a bad neighborhood. From the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, Johnson would often ride his bicycle 60 miles round trip to find a pickup basketball game. These were not just mean streets Johnson traveled, they were downright nasty.

“There was a lot of bad around me,” Johnson said.

So Johnson took the necessary precautions. At the playground, he would lift his bike and lodge the handlebars high into the chain-link fence so no one would steal it.

“They take my bike? . . . man, they know better,” Johnson said. “You have a knife, Jack? You’d better bring your knife, man.”

But Johnson made it, just like nearly each jump shot that he tried Tuesday night in the Pistons’ 105-93 victory over the Lakers at the Forum.

If Game 1 of the National Basketball Assn. championship series proved nothing else, it showed that the Pistons’ bench is about as thick as the thighs Johnson developed pedaling his bicycle.

Johnson finished with 16 points and personally scored four times as many points as the entire Laker bench, which consisted of Michael Cooper and Mychal Thompson in its entirety.

Here are the statistics: The Pistons outnumbered the Lakers, 4-2 in players, and 32-4 in points.

Johnson, Dennis Rodman, James Edwards and John Salley outrebounded the Laker non-starters, 17-4, blocked 3 shots to none by the Lakers and led in assists, 7-2.

Any way you add that, it was not a very good performance by the Michael/Mychal line.

“They didn’t produce,” Rodman critiqued the Laker substitutes. “We can go with nine guys. I don’t think they can. When they reach down on the bench, I don’t think it’ll help any.”

Laker Coach Pat Riley was not convinced.

“We’ve always had a great bench,” he said. “I’m not concerned about it. We definitely need scoring from our reserves, we definitely needed it tonight. That really hurts.”

The hurt lasted for a while. The only field goal the Lakers got from their reserves was a tip-in by Thompson near the end of the third quarter. Cooper missed each of the seven shots he took.

“I haven’t played that badly in a long time,” Cooper said. “I just wasn’t myself.”

Meanwhile, Vinnie Johnson was certainly himself, whoever he is.

Many know of his nickname “Microwave,” given to him by the Boston Celtics’ Danny Ainge in last year’s playoffs. But Johnson has another nickname, too. It is “EEE-Who,” which is what Vinnie says when he makes a basket, so his Piston teammates call him “The Who.”

In this case, “The Who” was the best guy coming off the bench Tuesday night. This is not a question, either.

Of course, “The Who” is getting back together. And when he does, he has the capability of beating the other team like a drum.

Cooper clearly thought Johnson was “The Who” that he heard.

“I know they call him the Microwave,” Cooper said. “You know what a microwave does? You push a button and it heats up in a hurry.”

Johnson made 7 of 11 shots, had 4 rebounds, 3 assists, scored his 16 points in just 27 minutes and came up with probably the third-biggest shot of the game.

The first two, of course, were the back-to-back three-pointers by Bill Laimbeer and Isiah Thomas in the last three seconds of the first half.

Johnson’s shot was also a three-pointer, right after a Laker timeout late in the third quarter, when the Pistons’ 17-point halftime lead had dwindled to 75-66.

“Somebody needed to do something,” Johnson said. “I thought it was a good shot. It took the crowd right out of the game.”

Never mind that the Lakers had already done a pretty good job by themselves.

The Pistons are enjoying the fact that they came into the Forum as underdogs. When they left the locker room for the start the game, several of the players actually began woofing, barking like dogs. Perhaps this explains their behavior.

“As far as we knew, we were supposed to get swept,” Johnson said. “None of us are wearing any championship rings.”

Said Piston Coach Chuck Daly: “A lot of people think we used mirrors to get here.”

After one game, the Pistons look like a bunch of weightlifters who can bench press a ton. Adrian Dantley figured that gives his team a numerical advantage.

“We’ve got nine guys,” said Adrian Dantley. “They’ve got seven. They’re going to have some fatigue. They’ve also had two tough seven-game series, and we haven’t had that. That’s going to take its toll if their key players play a lot of minutes.”

Johnson doesn’t always play a lot of minutes and he doesn’t always get a lot of points, but at least he has lived his dream, unlike some of his friends from the old neighborhood.

Sometimes, when Johnson goes back to Brooklyn, he asks about a few guys he knew from Franklin D. Roosevelt High School.

“I’d say, ‘Where’s so-and-so?’ ” Johnson said. “They’d say, ‘Oh, man, he got shot. He’s dead.’ Or ‘He’s on drugs.’ Or ‘He’s in jail.’ You heard all kinds of stories. But some guys made it. My dream was to play just one year in the NBA. I got that dream. But I know others didn’t.”