The NBA : Bad Knees, Bad Numbers Have Sampson Hurting

Ralph Sampson was a guest of Laker owner Jerry Buss during the National Basketball Assn. finals at the Forum last spring. Unless there is a drastic improvement in his health, that may be as close as Sampson comes to a championship in this league.

On Saturday, the Golden State Warriors’ 7-foot 4-inch center scored just 1 point against his former teammates, the Houston Rockets. He missed all 4 of his shots from the floor, had just 5 rebounds and committed a team-high 6 turnovers. Meanwhile, the Rockets’ Akeem Olajuwon--who with Sampson once formed Houston’s Twin Towers--operating against Warrior power forward Larry Smith, had 18 points and 15 rebounds in a 119-109 victory.

In Sunday’s 109-94 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers, Sampson had 14 points, 6 rebounds and 5 assists in the first half, 2 points (on 1-of-5 shooting) and 2 rebounds in the second. Clearly, the condition of his surgically repaired knees is crippling his play, and it’s causing him to wonder whether he should press on.

“I’m going to contemplate talking to the doctors, talking to other people and seeing what they think,” Sampson said. “It hurts to play like this.

“(Sunday) night hurt a lot. That’s a possibility, coming out of the lineup. Like I said, I’m going to think about it.”

Said teammate Chris Mullin: “I really feel for him and I really respect him, because he’s sticking it out.”

Jack Donohue, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s high school coach at Power Memorial, was unable to attend Abdul-Jabbar’s farewell ceremony last week in New York’s Madison Square Garden. Donohue, coach of the Canadian Olympic team, was in Ottawa for a speaking engagement.

However, in an interview with Newsday’s Steve Jacobson, Donohue did address an incident that Abdul-Jabbar wrote about in his 1983 autobiography, “Giant Steps,” in which the player says Donohue told him he was “playing like a nigger.”

Donohue said: “It certainly hurt me. I know I don’t use that word. Here was a kid I’d talked to about black-and-white situations. I remember telling him, ‘There are people up in the stands, and you know what the idiots are saying. Now you’re giving them a chance to say you’re playing like a nigger.’

“He was in my home after that. His parents were in my home. Now years later, he remembers that as a big rupture. I’d have liked it to have gone better with us, but I’d feel worse if I’d said that.”

Add Abdul-Jabbar: Charles Barkley, for one, has little use for farewell tours. Said Barkley, who lived through Julius Erving’s final go-round with the Philadelphia 76ers:

“It got to be frustrating for us. There’s only so much you can say, only so much you can be given. The only excitement for the rest of us after a while was to see who gave the best gift. It was, ‘Oh, he got a car here,’ and ‘Oh, he got another car here,’ and ‘Oh, he just got a tennis-ball returner here.’ It got monotonous after a while.”

Weird statistic of the day: Seattle SuperSonics Coach Bernie Bickerstaff said he plans to think through his decision to make Xavier McDaniel the team’s sixth man and start second-year forward Derrick McKey instead, and here’s one reason why.

In Games 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9, McKey averaged only 7.4 points a game and shot 37% from the floor. In Games 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10, he averaged 14.2 points and shot 51.7%.

McDaniel, meanwhile, has been leading the SuperSonics in turnovers and went through a stretch of 5 games in which he did not shoot above 43%. He is the first player to go from All-Star starter to reserve in 1 season since Dave Bing of the Bullets in 1977.

Robert Towne, a screenwriter and director and close friend of Pat Riley, said the Laker coach inspired one scene in his new film, “Tequila Sunrise,” which stars Mel Gibson, Kurt Russell and Michelle Pfeiffer. The scene is one in which Russell’s character, a narcotics cop named Nick Frescia, clears a tray of soft drinks onto an associate.

Riley once did something similar in the Laker dressing room, splattering Abdul-Jabbar’s clothes hanging in his cubicle.

“(Riley) had to dramatize a point without hurting anyone,” Towne told the New York Times, “and when the trainer walked in with a tray of Cokes, he dumped them on Kareem. Like Frescia, he’s both calculating and emotional.”

The expansion Orlando Magic is still more than 1,000 tickets short of the NBA’s mandated quota of 10,000 season tickets sold by Dec. 31. Failure to meet that number gives the league the right to revoke the franchise.

“No one seems to be taking it seriously but us,” said Ashleigh Bizzelle, Orlando’s director of box-office operations.

Case in point: While CBS made last Saturday’s Laker-Detroit Piston game the NBA’s first prime-time telecast of a regular-season game in almost 17 years, Orlando was the only NBA market not to see the game. The local affiliate there chose to show “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and another film called “The Man Who Lived at the Ritz” instead.

You wouldn’t think that Michael Jordan would need scoring advice from anyone, considering that he scored 30 points in the fourth quarter of the Chicago Bulls’ loss to Denver Saturday. But Jordan says he has taken the counsel of Bull backup center Dave Corzine, whose career average in 10 seasons is 9.1 points.

“Corzine keeps telling me to shoot the jumper because it takes less energy,” Jordan said. “Look at him. You see he’s never tired after a game. So I took his advice.”

Quintin Dailey said he may become a referee after he’s through playing.

“I’m used to the boos,” the Clipper guard said with a smile. “I don’t want to be derogatory, but I’ve been through a lot. (Referees) have got a hard life, and I kind of like that.”

The Boston Celtics must sweep their home-and-home series with the New Jersey Nets tonight and Wednesday to avoid their first sub-.500 month since Larry Bird joined the team in 1979. So far, the Celtics’ only win on the road was in Miami, against the expansion Heat.

Peter May of the Hartford Courant, while urging that the Celtics’ new coach, Jimmy Rodgers, consider starting young players Reggie Lewis and Brian Shaw, said the team’s problem goes beyond Bird’s absence because of surgery. There is, he says, the Kevin McHale Question.

“With few exceptions, he is not helping (Robert) Parish on the boards, he is not playing good defense, he is not passing on offense, he is not running, he is not blocking shots, and that is not what the Celtics need from him,” May writes.

Short stuff: The 76ers are running an unusual promotion Wednesday in honor of rookie guard Scott Brooks, the 5-11 free agent from UC Irvine who has caught Philadelphia’s fancy with his hustling, aggressive play. Any fan 5-11 or under gets in for a discounted ticket.

“He’s already a fan favorite,” said Barkley, who has been sharing his house with Brooks. “He’s the little, little guy everybody wants to do well in life. People want to see a guy like that go against the norm, an underdog. I call him ‘Wonderdog.’ ”

Said center Mike Gminski: “The last couple of years, little white point guards have been in vogue, with guys like John Stockton and Mark Price. We’re just keeping pace. But really, Scott played his way onto this team. He’s no fluke; he’s everybody’s Walter Mitty.”