Trail Blazers Are Seriously Flawed

The Lakers are winning this series against the Portland Trail Blazers because they’re winning the matchup that matters most, head to head.

It’s possible that the Lakers won’t face another team with as much talent as the Trail Blazers for the rest of playoffs. But for as long as they last in the postseason they won’t face a team with less mental fortitude than Portland, so they had better enjoy this while it lasts.

The Lakers can skate by with bad results in fundamental areas--free-throw shooting and defense--knowing sooner or later the Trail Blazers’ brains will melt down and hand the game over to them.

The Lakers shouldn’t hold a 2-0 lead in the series after making only 34 of 52 free throws on Sunday, losing the rebounding battle again and coming within a point of giving up 100 points for the second time.

But why should the Lakers worry about the Trail Blazers when the Trail Blazers weren’t worrying about them?

Portland spent most of the second half arguing with the referees and arguing with each other.

A foul called on Arvydas Sabonis in the third quarter set the whole team to howling. Rasheed Wallace was whistled for a foul and ran to the other end of the court--and that wasn’t even the play that drew a technical foul on him.

Sabonis and Brian Grant fought each other for an open rebound then exchanged words on their way downcourt.

Instead of capitalizing on the opportunity afforded by all of those Laker misses, the Trail Blazers chose to harp on the 52-21 disparity in attempts.

The Trail Blazers focused on everything except beating the Lakers, and left themselves vulnerable.

“As a mature ballclub,” that wise old sage Kobe Bryant was saying, “when you see somebody get down on themselves, that’s when you have to attack.”

There’s a reason the Trail Blazers have to hear comments like that from 19-year-olds, why Bryant kept referring to them as a “young team” even though Portland’s average age of 27.4 is a year older than the Lakers. (Although taking away 39-year-old Alton Lister--and why hasn’t someone done that yet?--would drop Portland down to 25.9 years old.)

The Trail Blazers keep acting like juveniles. They make the Lakers look like savvy veterans by comparison.

The Trail Blazers are unprofessional, both in their personal life (i.e. Isaiah Rider’s arrest for using cloned cellular phones) and in their workplace, with a series of missed practices and shootarounds.

Even the good guys, like Carlos Rogers, who was prepared to risk his career and donate his kidney to his dying sister, have their quirks. Rogers isn’t on the playoff roster, and during a timeout Friday instead of listening in on the huddle he acted as if he were playing trombone along with the Laker Band.

Nothing and no one is safe when they the Trail Blazers are around. Damon Stoudamire took out his frustrations with the referees on a TV monitor while returning to the locker room after Friday night’s game. Wallace put an extra point on the end of the Game 2 by kicking the ball so high it hit a beam above the Forum scoreboard and bounced back behind the courtside seats.

All of that stuff has a way of coming back at you at the worst times, like the fourth quarter of playoff games. Do you think this group--which has ticked off the league office for everything from off-season arrests to the length of their shorts--would get any breaks from the referees? And do they think all of their protesting and showing up the referees on Sunday will do anything to rectify it?

There’s a correlation between what goes on in these guys’ heads and what goes on on the court. And it’s no surprise that the Trail Blazers keep living up--or down--to their reputation.

Stoudamire, a Portland native, knew what that reputation was even before he came to the Trail Blazers in a February trade.

“Every time I picked up a paper it was The Jail Blazers, the bad guys who get caught with cellular phones,”’ he said after practice Saturday. “I don’t know if the image will change. Maybe it’ll change if we start winning games.

With this group, it will take more than that and Stoudamire knows it.

“The image is there,” he said. “[Rider] could get saved and become a born-again Christian and nobody would care.”

As he said this, Wallace and Jermaine O’Neal were engaged in a three-point shooting contest--with their left hands. As if that were something they could use in a game. Then Rider came over to lecture them. With his hand on his hip he said: “Do some of you boys want to work on your rights?”

Then he laughed at the absurdity of him playing the role of disciplinarian, and joined in the left-handed shooting contest.

That stuff might be fine during a shootaround in Milwaukee on a Tuesday morning in January. This is the playoffs. Or at least it’s supposed to be. It won’t feel like it until the Lakers play a real team, a serious team, like the Seattle SuperSonics.

For now the Lakers will take the gift-wrapped victories that come with playing a dysfunctional unit like the Blazers.