Lakers Lack Fourth Gear

There was a push, but it didn’t come to shove. There was an action, but not a reaction.

There were the SuperSonics midway through the fourth quarter Monday night, and then there were the Lakers.

“They pushed us and intimidated us,” Nick Van Exel said, “and we backed away.”

They were backed into a hole, and then were unable, or unwilling to do anything about it. They were in deep too, suddenly not merely losing a game, as had been the case minutes earlier, but getting blown out, eventually by a 106-92 margin before 17,072 at KeyArena in the opener of the Western Conference semifinals.

What a strange time to sound retreat. The SuperSonics were the team, after all, that had gone 3-3 to close the regular season and then needed five games to shake off the young Minnesota Timberwolves, finally finishing Saturday and getting only one practice and a shootaround to prepare for this always-emotional matchup. The Lakers? They had won 25 of their previous 29 games and had been off since beating the Portland Trail Blazers on Thursday.

Not only that, the Lakers had the momentum, their 14-point deficit early in the third quarter gone in a little more than eight minutes, leading to a tie at 82-82 with 8:39 left in the fourth. The SuperSonics went up, but only by 88-86 with 5:25 remaining.

And that was the last anyone saw of the Lakers. A 15-3 rally by Seattle took care of that, a span of three minutes 45 seconds during which Rick Fox accounted for the only L.A. field goal and Shaquille O’Neal, bound for 27 points and 11 rebounds, made one free throw.

“They just dominated us, that’s all,” Coach Del Harris said. “Their defense and energy was better than ours. Thirteen-point quarters are not going to get you much.”

It got the Lakers frustrated. They committed six turnovers in the final period alone and missed 11 of 16 shots, both reversals for a team that had just done so well in both areas against the Trail Blazers. O’Neal got two shots in eight minutes. Van Exel had only one of the miscues, but went two of seven from the field.

“I told the fellas I’d take the blame for that,” he said.

For the misses.

“But I can’t take the blame for the heart and the intensity that we didn’t put out at the halfway point of the fourth quarter,” Van Exel said.

“They challenged us and we did not answer the challenge. They got up on us aggressively, and we didn’t come back at them.”

At least not when it mattered.

The SuperSonics, meanwhile, responded on several fronts, most notably in refusing to crumble against a more rested team after the big lead had been wasted. Given the way things went for them, maybe the tough first round against the Timberwolves even proved an asset, while the Lakers were resting.

“I think the big thing is that Game 4 and 5 got us to a maturity level of intensity, a demand mentality that maybe the Lakers didn’t get in their series,” Seattle Coach George Karl said. “I think they will probably get it on Wednesday night. But I think, in a way, the Minnesota series put our volume up a little higher than maybe their volume was.”

That was Jim McIlvaine, of all people, with his hand on the knob.

That the start of the game brought a McIlvaine sighting would have been significant enough, but then it came with a contribution from the center. The former was inevitable because the SuperSonics could not carry over the small-ball lineup from the first-round matchup with the Timberwolves (Jerome Kersey vs. Kevin Garnett at center), but the rest rated as tremors around these parts.

If not, the crowd’s reaction certainly did, the appreciation shown to McIlvaine when he was replaced for the first time, and not because he was replaced. His only previous playoff appearance had been seven minutes in Game 1 against Minnesota, after he had started all but 10 games at center during the regular season, so this was his first real contribution to the postseason effort, a new series and a new beginning.

Of course, he was still going against O’Neal, so the goals were on a sliding scale. So while O’Neal got seven points in the first quarter and missed three of four from the line and three of six from close range, McIlvaine became a factor with two early blocks.

He played only 15 minutes, but if the SuperSonics saw this as a windfall nonetheless, having a defender they could at least use to throw a big body on O’Neal, what came next was more along the lines of predictable.

After the Lakers took a 32-29 lead after the first 12 minutes, Gary Payton made a three-pointer on Kobe Bryant barely a minute into the second quarter. That was followed by Payton making a three-pointer on Van Exel. Sam Perkins made one the next possession. The No. 1 team in the league during the regular season had broken back out to spark a 15-0 run that soon turned into a 22-5 rally.

That gave Seattle a 51-37 cushion with 6:26 left. By halftime, when the lead was 12, the SuperSonics had gone nine of 14 on three-pointers, already only one shy of the Laker playoff record for an opponent, set exactly three years earlier by the SuperSonics at the Great Western Forum. The mark fell in the third quarter, en route to 11 makes in 21 tries.

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BY THE NUMBERS

28-13: Seattle advantage in fourth quarter after Lakers rallied from 12-point halftime deficit to lead by one after three quarters.

31.3%: Laker field-goal percentage in the fourth quarter (5 of 16).

15 of 16: Seattle from the free throw line in the fourth quarter.

55%: Lakers’ free-throw percentage (11 of 20)

11: Three-point baskets by Seattle, a record against the Lakers in a playoff game.

52-42: Seattle’s advantage in rebounding.

4: Number of times Seattle has beaten the Lakers this season (in five games), including three victories in the regular season.