Two Faces of Magic Johnson : This Team Was Ready --to Lose

When I walked into Houston’s arena, the Summit, last Wednesday morning, I was not looking for trouble. Practice wasn’t due to begin for an hour or so, and the Lakers, who had lost a playoff game to the Rockets the night before, were straggling in, one by one. Their coach got there last, maybe 45 minutes behind everybody else.

There was a third basketball stanchion erected at side-court, and Del Harris stood beneath it when he finally arrived. This was where he found out what Nick Van Exel had been saying under one basket, and what Magic Johnson had been saying under the other, much of which amounted to that after 85 games, the Lakers still weren’t sure who should have the ball.

What Harris did not know--until long after he uttered his perceptive “We got a lot of coaches on this team, don’t we?”--was what the next 48 hours would bring; mainly, misery, apology, defeat, elimination and an astounding acknowledgment by Johnson that, after attending a shoot-around before Thursday’s game: “I knew we had no chance of winning.”

Knock me over with a feather.

Any time a day comes when Magic Johnson himself can foresee that it’s “losin’ time,” something is definitely wrong in Lakerville. And I am trying vainly to put my finger on it, all the while wondering that if certified experts such as Harris and his boss Jerry West and his boss Jerry Buss have yet to ascertain what the problem is, how possibly could I?

Listen, when a team wins 53 games, posts the NBA’s sixth-best record and drops playoff games by margins of four, six and eight points to the league’s two-time champions, its world shouldn’t be coming to an end.

The hard truth is this:

That the Lakers rarely led Houston in either Game 3 or 4; that Hakeem Olajuwon ate their lunch; that Van Exel and Johnson missed 62 of 93 shots between them; that for all his supposed value, Sedale Threatt was scoreless in Games 1, 2 and 4; that starting center Vlade Divac was benched for 51 of the 96 minutes played in Houston; that Magic made some of the most careless passes of his life, and that George Lynch disappeared as if he worked for the CIA.

On top of that, there was West’s sympathetic rhetorical question with regard to Harris:

“How would you like to coach this team the last five weeks?”

This spoke volumes. West said it at Friday’s school’s-out, see-you-in-September parting session at the Forum, where players cut up playoff money (Magic excepted) and said their Laker goodbyes, some of them possibly forever (Magic included). If he will pardon my presumption, I can sense the conflict inside West as he wonders how much to tamper with a 53-victory team, particularly when he snaps off: “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team,’ and I saw a lot of attitudes around here I didn’t like.”

Come July 1, the Lakers will “be busy,” West confirmed. That is the date the free-agent market opens for business.

Several months into this season, I thought the Lakers were only a player away from being Bullish enough to win the NBA, that with Johnson at forward, a strong bench led by Peeler and a parting with either Elden Campbell or Divac to make room for a free agent, this club would be sitting pretty. But I no longer think this.

Because the Lakers have flunked their team-chemistry exam, they must reevaluate everything now. With every word out of Johnson’s mouth, I am more amazed at what is happening behind the scenes.

He said Friday: “We could never get on the same page. I was spending most of my energy fighting battles within my own team. You guys don’t know the half of it.

“We don’t trust each other. We don’t know how to give. I was just zapped trying to keep this team together. I’ve been lost for words. I could tell we were going to lose at the shoot-around [Thursday]. The guys acted like we were down, 3-0. This was the kind of team I used to love to play against.”

As for the coach, from the time his friend Rudy Tomjanovich began their last coaching battle with a “lots of luck” to the time he devoted after the game lamenting a “bad magazine article” and the choices of journalists who have “nothing to lose” when they choose what to print, I wasn’t sure whether to sympathize with Harris or feel sad that he coaches a team that is rattled by a print press more than a full-court one.

We didn’t go water-skiing. We didn’t strike referees. We didn’t get his players suspended. And I had no idea that whenever I walked into a practice and heard the Lakers’ two best players criticizing the way the team is playing, that I was supposed to rush back to my laptop and write: “The Lakers are still a wonderful bunch of guys who are giving their all out there.”

In the locker room before Game 4, Johnson said he and Michael Cooper, now an assistant coach, talk all the time about how many current Lakers could play for Pat Riley the way they did. “Maybe one? Maybe two?” Magic said.

He was asked: “Because Riley wouldn’t stand for what’s going on around here?”

“Exactly,” Johnson said.

By the next day, when cleaning out his locker for what very well could be the last time--Raiders, Rams, Gretzky, Magic . . . can’t we keep anybody around here?--Johnson reiterated that Harris, while a good coach and good man, in his opinion “gave us too much leeway. He should have put his foot down harder.”

What a mess West, Buss and Harris have on their plate. Sixth-best record in the NBA . . . and unsure whether to kiss these guys on their cheeks or kick them in their butts. I feel their pain.