Lakers Took Punch Away From Sonics

Everybody in the Forum knew what the Seattle SuperSonics had to do to beat the Lakers: Get the ball to Dale Ellis.

When they couldn’t do it, the next day’s headlines were already guaranteed: “Wipeout! Lakers Blow it Open.”

When Dale Ellis gets off 12 shots, most of them poor, Seattle is handing over its sword.

Seattle is a team that relies on muscle, not guile. It makes its fight like a swarmer, a brawler. The Lakers are more like somebody who would be called Sugar Ray. They can knock you out but first they make you dizzy with jabs and footwork. Teams like the SuperSonics spend most of the night looking for them.

The Lakers handled Dale Ellis Wednesday night as if he had just got off a load of turnips. They know where he likes to shoot from. And they made sure he never got there.

“Somebody did a good job in the scouting report,” said Ellis, a quiet but accessible young man who looks not unlike the sprinter, Carl Lewis. “They know the shot I like and they steered me away from it all night.”

You get a measure of how important the Lakers feel Dale Ellis is to the Seattle offense when you know that the Lakers switched off four people guarding him through the night, and sometimes it seemed as if all four were on him at once.

“When Dale is being double- and triple-teamed, logic would dictate one or two people would be open somewhere,” his coach, Bernie Bickerstaff, said in some exasperation. “We can’t seem to find them.”

The Laker strategy seemed to be to let Seattle’s lesser gunner, Xavier McDaniel, have his shots and concentrate on smothering Dale Ellis.

The plot seemed to work. McDaniel got 17 points, and the Lakers shrugged. Ellis got 14 on five baskets--but two of them were three-pointers from desperation range. He missed three other three-pointers. Clearly, the league likes to make Ellis shoot from the boondocks. He got no point-blank shots all night. He needed a cannon. The basket was on the horizon.

Ellis has to get his shots for the Sonics to boom. He led the club this year with 2,253 points, or 27.5 a game. It behooves the Lakers to chop that in half.

Ellis salutes them for doing it.

“That’s the best they’ve played against us all year,” he said. “They put a lot of pressure on our point guard, and I wasn’t getting the passes.”

It wasn’t so long ago that league brain trusts didn’t spend that much time trying to neutralize Ellis, or see to it he didn’t get many passes. The career of Dale Ellis is a classic illustration of the sporting question, “What’s so smart about basketball?”

You know right away something is badly awry when you look at a basketball guide and see where Dale Ellis, playing for the Dallas Mavericks, scored 508 points or 7.1 a game one year--and the very next, scored 2,041 or about 25 points a game for Seattle.

What happened? Had the Mavericks just kept him around to in-bound the ball, go in for guys in foul trouble? Or did they just tell him to dish off to Mark Aguirre in the unlikely event he did get his hands on the ball?

“They had no confidence in me,” Ellis explained as he sat in a locker room, contemplating his team’s second straight loss to the Lakers the other night. “That way you start to get no confidence in yourself. I had to get out of there.”

When he got traded to Seattle, Bickerstaff could see right away what the trouble was. Ellis was out of position. It wasn’t that he was playing the post incorrectly, or was playing off the wrong foot on the give-and-go, he was in the wrong place on the court when the game started.

All his life he’d been a forward--through high school in Georgia, at college and with the Mavericks. It was almost as bad a call as thinking Babe Ruth was a pitcher or Gary Cooper an architect.

At 6-foot-7, he’d be a small forward but a big guard. At guard, even off guard, he wouldn’t need somebody to get him the ball, he’d have it. Bickerstaff drooled at the possibilities.

“He handled the ball so well in our drills,” recalled Bickerstaff. “He had the lateral equipment, he could see the whole court. I figured if we put some hard work in it, he could make an outstanding guard.”

He did better than that. He became one of the league’s best.

“We decided to move Gerald Henderson and give him the spot,” added Bickerstaff.

“I’m still learning the position,” said Ellis. “I feel more comfortable in it every day but I’m going to school in it every night.”

With Magic Johnson and Byron Scott and Michael Cooper dealing out the lessons these nights, Ellis couldn’t have a better faculty. Trouble is, unless the Sonics find a way to get him his shot, school may be out.

One of the things Professors Johnson, Scott and Cooper are teaching him--pounding into him--is that it’s hard to win the championship from three-point range.