Trip Ends Perfectly as Lakers Clip Celtics

By all rights, they should’ve gotten parquet floored.

Instead, in their fourth and final city and fifth and final day of the trip, against a young, fast full-court pressing Boston Celtic team, the Lakers got enormous efforts once again from Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, superb supporting work from Derek Fisher and another clampdown defensive effort.

And they won, 99-90, before 18,624 at FleetCenter on Monday night and despite every reason in the world not to.

Kenny Anderson was going a thousand miles an hour; Antoine Walker was spinning and hopping his way up and around every Laker in sight; for long turnover-strewn stretches, the Lakers leaked fuel, looked pasty and hovered near exhaustion.

By the normal measurements of distance, time and normal Laker letdowns, the Lakers had every reason to pack it in, accept a beating at the tail end of a very successful Eastern trip, and start thinking about Christmas.

But the normal measurements are irrelevant now, replaced by a perfectionist coach and tightly structured play, which has produced their second seven-game winning streak of the season, 14 victories in 15 games, the league’s best record (22-5) and a 4-0 trip.

On Monday night, it even produced grudging praise from Coach Phil Jackson, who can often make assured victory sound like frustrating defeat.

“We have to be pleased with what we’ve done,” Jackson said. “[But] we didn’t beat the top teams in the East, that’s for sure, [and] Minnesota was 0-7 for December. You have to be realistic.

“The fortunate thing about it is you have to put a lot of energy into playing four games in five nights--we were able to do that.”

The Lakers had to summon whatever energy they had left, or else they would’ve gotten run into the ground against Boston Coach Rick Pitino’s traditional 94-foot speed trap.

The Celtics were without star forward Paul Pierce, who is sidelined because of an ankle injury, but they still had Anderson (21 points, 10 assists) to terrorize the passing lanes and turn errant throws into layups the other way, and Walker (24 points, 22 in the second half) to create on the inside.

“They do that stuff, Rick Pitino’s ‘Outbreak’ monkey defense,” O’Neal said of the frenetic Celtic press. “I’ve been going against that defense since ‘89-90 [when O’Neal was at Louisiana State and Pitino at Kentucky]. I knew what to expect.”

O’Neal scored 34 points, grabbed 20 rebounds and committed eight turnovers before the long night was done, participating in all but two minutes of the game.

Together, he and Bryant helped the Lakers weather the two huge Boston tidal waves--15-1 in the second quarter to erase a Laker lead, and 12-0 to open the third to jump to a brief double-digit lead--by just staying on the floor and making their way to the basket through the chaos.

“For us, it’s simple mathematics,” O’Neal said. “If we do what we can do, if we do what we’re supposed to do, if we play a team game, we’ll be all right. When it got down to it, we were able to play our game.”

Bryant, who finished with 27 points, four steals and four assists, said of the Boston press: “It wasn’t really that tough. Just a matter of taking our time.

“They were able to get a lot of balls away from us because we maybe had mental lapses where we exposed the ball, threw lazy passes, maybe that comes from fatigue, but we were able to regroup.”

The Lakers committed a season-high 24 turnovers, but had only three in the fourth quarter, when O’Neal scored 12 points and Bryant 11 as the Lakers outpaced Boston, 32-21.

“He asked out at some point in the third quarter and I gave him 5.5 seconds to come on out and rest,” Jackson, grinning, said of O’Neal, “and kidded him about it when he came out.

“I thought that he handled himself very well during the course of the game, there were some calls I thought were a little bit difficult that went his way and he just stayed cool and calm on it. And came back and played really a terrific game.”

Said Fisher, who scored 13 points and had four assists in 28 minutes: “To close the trip out in this fashion, with a win, really feels good. We felt like this would be a testy road trip, and we finished 4-0.”

BEST RECORDS

1. LAKERS

22-5, .815

2. PORTLAND

18-7, .720

3. SEATTLE

18-7, .720

BEST ROAD RECORDS

1. LAKERS

10-3, .769

2. PORTLAND

11-4, .733

3. SEATTLE

8-4, .667