Riley Wants a Piston Rematch Rather Than ‘Easy Way Out’

The Lakers’ opponent for the National Basketball Assn. championship series has yet to be determined, but the Lakers are practicing at Westmont College as if a rematch with the Detroit Pistons is inevitable.

Coach Pat Riley, in fact, said Thursday that he will be disappointed if the Pistons do not beat the Chicago Bulls in the Eastern Conference finals because he wants the Lakers to prove that last season’s seven-game series victory was no fluke.

“We’ve got five days to develop a mind-set,” Riley said. “(The Pistons) are so committed to the revenge thing. Their mission is to beat us. They are challenging us more than anyone’s ever challenged us. We’ve got to want them more than they want you.

“If we go in there and say we just want to ‘three-peat’ and win one for Cap (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), then you don’t have the right competitive attitude. You’ve got to stimulate (the players’) minds more, bring back all the little things that were said last year, bring back some videotapes. You got to bring it all back, otherwise they forget. Then, after the first or second game, they’ll realize what it was like.”

The Lakers would have the home-court advantage against the Bulls, but Riley wants a higher degree of difficulty. “It would be the easy way out to play Chicago, because we’d have the home court,” he said. “This is the pursuit of pleasure versus the avoidance of pain. People have a tendency to avoid (the difficult) and move to what’s easier. We want to move toward that which is difficult because we have a point to prove.”