Hornets Come Close to Conceding Defeat

The Chicago Bulls won’t come right out and say it, but they know. Charlotte Coach Dave Cowens and his players do too.

With a 3-1 lead in their best-of-seven Eastern Conference semifinal series with the Hornets, all that’s left for the Bulls is to finish things off Wednesday.

“We’ve got to beat these guys three in a row,” Cowens said Monday. “I don’t know if anybody’s done that since Michael Jordan started playing.”

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The New York Knicks have one thing going for them when they resume their Eastern Conference semifinal Wednesday in Indianapolis: The last time they played the Indiana Pacers in the playoffs, in 1995, they also were down 3-1 and came back to win Games 5 and 6 before being eliminated.

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Facing elimination in tonight’s Western Conference semifinals series, the San Antonio Spurs are taking heart from their two previous strong performances against the Utah Jazz in Salt Lake City.

“We’ve played these guys tough twice in their building, so we know we can be successful [in Utah],” Coach Gregg Popovich said. “We lost two games by a total of four points. That’s not much.”

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Al Harrington, a 6-foot-8 forward considered by many experts to be the best high school basketball player in the country, will bypass college and enter the June NBA draft. The 18-year-old averaged 21.9 points and 10.7 rebounds at St. Patrick’s, a tiny parochial school. . . . Mark Miller, a 6-foot-2 guard who averaged 19.7 points for Illinois-Chicago declared himself eligible for the NBA draft.