Stale Players, Rotten Game

All those suspensions caught up with the bad-boy Lakers, who were rusty, reckless and really out of sync in Game 1 of their playoff series against the Houston Rockets, losing and losing ugly, 87-83.

Back after time off for bad behavior, neither Nick Van Exel nor Magic Johnson remotely resembled his old self Thursday night. Van Exel was a brutal one for 11 shooting, and Johnson spent most of the night trying to make a pass that led to a basket. This keeps up, and the Lake Show is going to be in for a quick cancellation.

Thanks mainly to Eddie Jones, the Lakers managed to keep the two-time NBA champions at bay for three-fourths of the game, before suffering through The Fourth Quarter From Hell. For most of the final 12 minutes of this basketball game, the Lakers couldn’t have made a basket if Hakeem Olajuwon had lifted them up on his shoulders.

Anthony Peeler’s absence was a factor, sure, but shouldn’t have affected the Lakers this badly, although even eternal optimist Chick Hearn was telling his radio-TV listeners by the end of this game, “I don’t think the Lakers can beat the Rockets without Peeler, I really don’t.”

Laker players and coaches scoffed at the notion that their offense was so ineffectual because of the recent enforced absences of Van Exel and Johnson. Yet it was painfully obvious that these two players, the backcourt backbone of the team--even if Johnson’s position is “point forward”--were not in any sort of groove, laying brick after brick.

Johnson did finish with a respectable 20 points and 13 rebounds, but those numbers were deceptive. His hook shots were short, his jumper not sharp and when he stepped to the line for a free throw after a technical, it clanked off the rim. After three quarters, Magic had two baskets and two assists.

As for Van Exel, at halftime he didn’t have a point. His total for the game was five--in 32 minutes--and he and Johnson were particularly guilty parties in an offense that committed a whopping 22 turnovers.

Elden Campbell did his part on that score, also, turning over the ball four times with an assortment of careless passes. And neither Campbell nor Vlade Divac scored a point in the fourth quarter, with their frontline partner, Cedric Ceballos, scoring two.

All in all, this was one of the Lakers’ poorest efforts of the season. They looked listless, even in front of a loud home crowd, to the point that with 2.2 seconds remaining in the third quarter, enough time to get off some sort of shot, Ceballos casually lobbed the in-bounds pass right into the hands of a Rocket, under the Houston basket.

This is supposed to be the best first-round series of the playoffs, but it won’t be that unless the Lake Show gets its act together by Saturday’s matinee. The chances of L.A. losing both Games 1 and 2 at home and coming back to win this series are remote, although that is precisely what the Phoenix Suns did to the Lakers a few years back.

Before the game, Houston chatterbox Sam Cassell said he would “have to get on Nick’s case a little bit” on the court about his recent transgressions, including those detailed in a national magazine article that could not have been (where the Lakers are concerned) more ill-timed.

Whatever trash Cassell talked must have been choice, because Van Exel, in his first game after a seven-game suspension, was a mere ghost of his usual self. And while Johnson had recently returned from his brief suspension, he was far off his customary postseason form as well, although this is a new experience for him, beginning playoff games on the bench.

“He didn’t have it tonight,” Cassell said of Van Exel. “His shots weren’t dropping. The one open one he had, he made, but that was about it.”

Most of the Rockets naturally thought their defense responsible for the Lakers’ inability to hit the broad side of the barn.

Said Olajuwon: “I don’t think we stole this one. We took it from them.”

If the Lakers intend to be the takers and not the takees, they had better steal one back.

“The Lakers are not going to fall apart. They’ll come back,” Houston Coach Rudy Tomjanovich said, the nicest thing anybody said about the Lakers all night.