Lakers Scary, but They Aren’t Yet Monsters

New location, new excitement, same old story.

The excitement lasts two hours. The game lasts two-and-a-half.

The Lakers tease like monsters, then run under the bed.

They may well be the best team in the NBA at this point of the 1997-98 season.

They might easily ride their spring rush into early summer.

They could even win a series without home-court advantage against Seattle, Utah, even Chicago.

But from where they sit this morning, still in the first round, still in Portland, their season-long paradox remains unchanged.

The monster still need to proves it is a monster.

The Lakers still need to prove they can win a game they should win.

Tuesday afternoon, as is customary with teams in clinching situations, the Lakers checked out of their Portland hotel.

Late Tuesday night, they checked back in carrying the baggage of another one that got away, a 99-94 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers in Game 3 of the first round of the NBA playoffs.

“We knew we had to win, we made big plays to do it,” the Trail Blazers’ Walt Williams said.

The Lakers made those plays early, but not when they counted.

“Didn’t get it done,” Coach Del Harris said.

Shaq dominates like no other player has dominated this spring. Then he clanks two important free throws.

Eddie Jones plays suffocating defense. Then Isaiah Rider hits a late reverse layup while Jones misses an open three-point basket.

Derek Fisher plays well enough that Harris feels he should be directing the team down the stretch instead of Nick Van Exel.

But in the stretch, Fisher is painfully stretched. He throws up an airball, misses a layup.

Before the game, Harris said his team knew it needed to work on defense and rebounding.

“Those are two key elements that we lacked a little in the first two games,” he said. “They are something we need tonight.”

They got it half right.

The Trail Blazers shot only 44%, including only 23% of their three-pointers.

But the Lakers were outrebounded, 52-38.

This team sometimes has a problem, it seems, with getting things half right.

Then, of course, there are the free throws.

The Lakers only made an embarrassing 54%.

Before the game, talking about Portland’s previous complaints that the Lakers scored too many point on free throws, he said, “Hey, if you foul us, we’re going to shoot free throws.”

He smiled. “The good news for other teams, though, is that we don’t shoot them very well.”

Afterward, that smile was gone.

“When you have the worst free-throw shooting percentage in the league, it is going to hurt you,” he said.

Of course, the Lakers didn’t exactly have to win. Harris said a sweep didn’t matter.

“The thing is, you just want to win [the series],” he said before the game. “None of that other stuff really matters.”

But he also said this about basketball in general: “With things like preparation and momentum, quite often in a short series, I’ve seen the lesser team win.”

That cannot happen here. That should not happen here.

But the scary thing about the Lakers’ loss Tuesday is that it can still happen here.

Against an erratic Trail Blazer team that seemed intent on throwing away a game even after it had dramatically grabbed it, a victory here would have mattered.

With the Minnesota Timberwolves showing exactly how scary these five-game series can be by putting Seattle on the ropes, a show of force would have mattered.

To knock a reeling opponent through the ropes would have sent a message not just to future opponents, but to themselves.

These Trail Blazers were desperate, with Rider already claiming they needed a miracle to win the series.

“Everything we do, in the back of our minds, we know this could be the last time we do it,” guard Gary Grant said before the game. “Everybody is thinking about, thinking, if it’s in the final two minutes and we are down by eight points, this could be it.”

This is what they were thinking before the game.

This is what they were thinking afterward:

“We knew the first two games, we were right in the ballgame,” Williams said. “We knew we come back here, we’ve got a chance.”

Those are words the Lakers hoped they would never hear.

Now they must hear them for at least another day.

“We should have won this game,” Robert Horry said. “The longer [the series] goes, the more they have to win, and the more we have to lose.”