Worst Early Fears Are Being Realized

This Laker season began with hopes and worries: Hopes of the team’s first title since 1987-88; worries that there were too many agendas, too little experience and too many complications to cohesively make that title run.

Forty games into it, after a coaching change, a trade that is still reverberating through the franchise, and the quiet little signing of Dennis Rodman, the hopes are rapidly dissipating.

The worries, complications, immaturity and agendas remain. And, like the Lakers themselves, they are getting worse every day.

And the coach is saying the same things that were said back in February.

“We have to have eight, nine, 10 guys doing their job,” Kurt Rambis said in the wake of Tuesday’s attitude-adjusting loss in Portland, while singling out Shaquille O’Neal for praise. “That’s what a team sport is all about.

“It’s not just one guy doing their thing, one guy doing what they want to do. It’s everybody on the same page at both ends of the floor, understanding what we have to do in order to excel as a team.

“Everybody has to be on that same page, and everybody has to be willing to make sacrifices on both ends of the floor for the benefit of the team, irregardless of their own personal goals and their own personal achievements and numbers. They have to set those aside.”

How about Rodman, who Tuesday asked out of a game for the fourth time in his 50-day Laker career? Has he sacrificed for team unity?

“That’s a question you have to ask Dennis,” Rambis said.

Last season, with Nick Van Exel, Eddie Jones and Elden Campbell still on the team and Del Harris coaching it, the Lakers won 61 games and got to the Western Conference final, where they got swept by the Utah Jazz, which was what triggered the restructuring mood.

Since then, there have been plenty of changes, but nothing has been solved, nothing has been gained.

More questions have been raised.

The team is still talented, but the defense ranks near the bottom of the league, the offense has been awkwardly tinkered with to suit Glen Rice, Rodman has been far more reliable as an irritant than as a player, and the team is dangerously thin.

“Our bench isn’t as a deep as it needs to be,” reserve forward Robert Horry said. “Look at Portland, they’ve got a whole second five they can put in and don’t lose a beat. Our bench is not that deep.

“We need everybody who’s healthy to be there. We can’t have guys out hurt.”