NBA PLAYOFFS : Outside Shot at the Title : Western finals: Byron Scott has been the man with the hot hand in playoffs.

If Byron Scott didn’t exist, Magic Johnson would have had to invent him.

If Jerry West hadn’t stolen Scott from the Clippers, he would have had one fewer controversy in his career as general manager.

And Scott wouldn’t have had that baptism of elbows and cold shoulders the Lakers put him through.

Nor would Scott have had to survive last summer, wondering whether he would next be a Cavalier, Pacer, Net or Laker.

Eight years later, here’s Byron, still at the right hand of Magic. Scott’s 4,207 career field goals represent a good portion of Johnson’s record assist total. Imagine the Lone Ranger without his faithful Indian companion, Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral without Doc Holliday.

Imagine Magic drawing all those double-teams without a fast gun beside him to settle accounts.

“He’s on a roll, make no mistake about that,” Golden State Coach Don Nelson said of Scott in the last series.

“He has been (hot) all playoffs long. We knew that going in. He’s the Laker who has been hottest in the playoffs and they need it.”

Having bombed the Rockets and Warriors, Scott hit the Trail Blazers with a nine-for-12 effort in the Lakers’ 111-106 Game 1 victory. From now on, they can be expected to leave a defender on Scott if they double-team Magic.

Could a shooter ask more than this life of Byron, a career alongside the greatest playmaker of his time?

If so, Scott earned it.

Acquired in a deal with San Diego for the popular Norm Nixon and quoted as having already compared himself favorably to Johnson, Scott’s introduction to the NBA was memorable.

“My last year, I played point guard at Arizona State,” Scott said. “I averaged something like 27 points, seven assists, six rebounds. Some writer told me that was kind of like Magic Johnson and I said, ‘Yeah, whatever, OK.’ He took it out of context and made whatever he wanted out of it.

“Which I think made Magic mad.”

It certainly got Johnson’s attention.

Johnson and Michael Cooper, smarting from the loss of their third musketeer, Nixon, who had been traded for Scott in the deal that inflamed the Lakers, sought to determine if the new man was for real.

“We shut him out his first training camp,” Johnson says. “Nobody even spoke to him.”

Scott says it took perhaps three months to pass over--and the first ones to take him in were Johnson and Cooper.

“They were the first ones to hit me and throw elbows at me, to see if I was going to fight back,” Scott says. “They were the first ones to accept me.”

Scott is now the closest Laker to Johnson, kids him most pointedly about his money, his fame, his publicity. Scott, himself, earns $1.1 million a year and owns three championship rings playing in Inglewood, where he grew up.

In the wake of last season’s playoff fall in Phoenix and Scott’s troubles defending Kevin Johnson, trade rumors pointed the Laker guard toward Cleveland in a deal for Hot Rod Williams or Indiana for Reggie Miller or New Jersey for Derrick Coleman. Scott paid close attention but put his real energy into rehabilitating the left hamstring that had hampered him since the ’89 finals.

He remained a Laker, played all 82 games and showed them all over.

“I’m just so happy for the way he’s come back because everybody was down on him for a while,” Johnson says. “He’s come back and he’s come back strong. Not just in this last game. He’s been great through the playoffs. Without him, we’d have been in some dogfights.

“Byron says, ‘OK, I’m not a superstar in terms of what everybody else thinks. But I’m a superstar in my teammates’ eyes. And I win and that’s important to me.’ ”

Indeed, Scott, one of the most recognizable athletes in Los Angeles, does interviews graciously but without a burning desire for headlines.

He never sought to be famous.

“Never wanted to be,” Scott says. “Never will be. I just go on with my everyday life with my family. I’m an everyday person.”

He’s an everyday sharpshooter with nine years of fast competition behind him. Of such commoners are dynasties forged.