Van Exel Turns On the Lights

For nearly a month he had played in the dark, sometimes literally. Hit-or-miss as an assist man, miss-or-miss as a shooter, looking bad from the field and dreadful on three-point shots, one of his usual weapons of choice.

That made Sunday the brightest night the Lakers had seen in a long time. They spotted Nick Van Exel again, and he became the king for a day who wasn’t even a King, breaking out of a 12-game slump to score 35 points and lead a 121-116 victory over Sacramento before 13,219 at the Forum.

After shooting 33.1% overall and 17.2% on three-point attempts going back to Feb. 24, Van Exel made nine of 18 from the field, including five of 12 three-point attempts. He also went 12 of 13 from the line, none bigger than the two he made with 17.6 seconds left, after getting his own rebound, to give the Lakers a 119-116 lead.

It was a significant victory too, and not only because the Lakers had lost five of seven and eight of 12. More importantly, they picked up a full game on the Kings in the playoff race, making it an eight-game cushion with 18 to play. And the Lakers also clinched the season series to earn the first tiebreaker, just in case.

The exclamation point to all this, of course, was Van Exel.

“I’m happy that he’s back,” said Vlade Divac, who contributed 24 points and nine rebounds. “When he’s back, everybody plays better. And it’s good timing, just before the playoffs.”

A classic streak shooter, Van Exel had been searching for his own timing for weeks. As in the previous three outings, when he went two for 10, two for 12 and two for eight. Or in that four-game stretch when he was four for 27 from behind the arc.

Nagging injuries had been a problem, most notably the back spasms that kept him out of the Chicago game on March 11. He tried to fight through the pain and the slump itself, once staying late after a game-day shoot-around to get in some extra practice, even after most of the lights had been turned off. So there was Van Exel, firing away in near darkness, a more fitting sight rarely found.

Come Sunday, it took him the first quarter to bust through. He had 14 points on four-of-eight shooting--making half of six three-point attempts in the process--during those first 12 minutes alone. That was already a bigger offensive output than he had managed in all but five of those previous 12 appearances.

By halftime, Van Exel had 21 points. Eight more in the fourth quarter paced the victory--even after the Kings had cut a 13-point deficit with 3:39 remaining down to one with 43 seconds left--and gave Van Exel his biggest scoring night since Feb. 20.

“It felt great,” he said. “It felt like old times. After shooting the ball that bad for long, it feels good.”

Not to the Kings, who have lost 13 of their last 16 to free-fall into a tie with the Denver Nuggets for the eighth and final playoff playoff spot, with the teams meeting tonight in Sacramento. Mitch Richmond scored 38 points, 15 of those in the fourth quarter to lead the comeback, and still it wasn’t enough.

RODMAN HURT

San Antonio’s Dennis Rodman is injured in a motorcycle accident. C3