Jazz Beating One-Man Team

Somehow the Lakers have managed to make Shaquille O’Neal irrelevant. No matter what he does, they simply can’t beat the Utah Jazz.

When O’Neal had a subpar Game 1, no one else picked up for him. When he came through with 39 points and 15 rebounds in Game 3 Friday night, no one else supported him.

The Lakers can’t do anything without him. And they can’t do anything if he is the only one out there working.

O’Neal took 30 shots Friday, more than a third of the Laker field-goal attempts. He made 17 and was the only Laker who attempted more than four shots to shoot better than 50%. The way things were going, the Lakers would have been better off with Shaq taking free throws than the rest of the players shooting jumpers.

While the Lakers are getting beat by the likes of Howard Eisley, Chris Morris and Shandon Anderson, none of the other three Laker all-stars--or anyone else, for that matter--can beat the Jazz.

It isn’t O’Neal’s job to shoot three-pointers, and the Lakers who are supposed to do that have made only 13 of 58 (22%), including five of 19 in Game 3.

Nick Van Exel was one for eight on three-pointers and two for 13 overall in Game 3, which snuffed out his seven assists. Eddie Jones was six for 19.

After Shaq, no other Laker reached double-digits until Jones made a reverse dunk with 10:03 left in the fourth quarter. Even that didn’t seem like vintage Jones; the ball hit the rim and crawled over.

Jones tried to be aggressive in the first quarter, but the way the Shaq-oriented Laker offense is set up right now, there’s nothing for Jones to do but go one-on-one. It wasn’t working.

“If you have a big dominating guy like Shaq, you want to get Shaq the ball, you want him to do his thing,” Van Exel said. “I really don’t know what we can do. We run a lot of motion sets, but we haven’t got much out of them. We want to go to our superstar. That’s what we’re doing, we’re living by it.”

More like dying by it.

Utah Coach Jerry Sloan said before the series that there was nothing the Jazz could do to stop Shaq, and apparently he wasn’t joking. But it’s obvious that the Jazz can stop anyone else on the team. They’re bumping them, they’re staying with them on the perimeter, they’re helping on the drives, leaving anyone but O’Neal.

And they aren’t leaving to go to O’Neal.

” They’re not doubling on him, they’re just digging, but they’re staying with the perimeter guys,” Van Exel said. “I don’t know what to do to get open shots. They just came in with a good game plan, and they’ve been doing it the whole series.”

As for the Lakers, “We never really made any adjustments offensive-wise,” Van Exel said, and that’s on Del Harris.

Harris and the coaching staff did make some good defensive adjustments. Utah always seems to do them one better.

For the most part, the Lakers defended the pick-and-roll about as well as possible. There were times they stopped it, forced Utah to look for another option, rotated to cover that and still got burned because the Jazz made the extra pass and the open jumper.

Open jumpers were a rare sight for the Lakers.

” The previous series, we would throw it in, they were doubling,” Van Exel said. “We were getting open looks. That’s the main thing they took away from us. Sloan and those guys, I guess they’re going with the fact that we’re going to let Shaq beat us, we’re not going to let the rest of the guys go off. We’ve been bringing our same game plan to the table.”

Even when the open looks came, the Lakers didn’t take advantage. They were done in by missed, momentum-killing three-pointers by Jones and Rick Fox in the third quarter and a missed three-pointer by Robert Horry in the last two minutes that pretty much sealed the Lakers’ fate.

And that fate is obvious by now. It felt that way the whole game, after the Lakers couldn’t jump out to a huge lead after their 9-2 start.

Just the thought of a three-point game at the start of the fourth quarter should have sent shivers all the way through Lakerland.

Asking the Lakers to go possession for possession, free throw for free throw, with the Jazz is asking too much.

The Lakers know it.

“I think the better team is winning,” Van Exel said. “We’ve had our chances. We had our chances in Game 2. The better team is just pulling it out in the last few minutes.”

If it’s tough to pull out one fourth quarter against the Jazz, how can the Lakers expect to win the next four to keep their season alive?

“A team like Utah, beating those guys four straight,” Van Exel had to laugh at the foolishness of the proposition. “Wow.”