Seattle First Up in Three-Day Marathon

See how quickly things change in this compacted schedule?

After reeling off three consecutive victories, and watching Seattle drop its first two games of the year back-to-back (including a 110-80 loss at Utah on Saturday), the once-sluggish Lakers can jump ahead of the SuperSonics in the Western Conference race with a victory today in Seattle.

“We love playing the Sonics,” Coach Del Harris said of the team the Lakers beat in the second round of the playoffs last season. “We especially love playing them up there. It’s a great building and a great crowd.”

Harris also stressed that the Lakers’ three-game, three-city, three-day trip that begins today shouldn’t be viewed with special dread.

After playing the SuperSonics, the Lakers will fly to Denver, play there Monday, fly that night to Vancouver, and play the Grizzlies Tuesday night before heading home.

“It’s no big deal,” Harris said. “In fact, one of my biggest wins was back in ‘81-82, we played tough games on Friday-Saturday and had a Sunday afternoon game in Denver, and the airplane was delayed getting in and we had the guys get into uniforms on the bus and that was when Denver was winning 50 games a year. . . .

“I thought, ‘Wow, three games in three nights and we’re traveling here, no shoot-around, no nothing, we’ve got no chance today.’ We wiped them out.”

Harris said he won’t specifically ration minutes in the first two games in order to keep players fresh for the third.

“You can’t really be saying, well, we’re only going to play so-and-so 25 minutes tonight because we have to play tomorrow night,” Harris said. “I still think you’ve got to try to win the games one at a time. Each game has its own demands as to how many minutes you should play certain people and who should play.”

TODAY at Seattle

3, Channel 4

* Site--Key Arena.

* Radio--KLAC (570).

* Records--Lakers 6-3, SuperSonics 6-2.

* 1997-98 Record vs. SuperSonics--1-3.

* Update--For the first time this season the Lakers face a more-traveled team. The SuperSonics, who lost Saturday in Utah, have been getting MVP-quality play out of point guard Gary Payton (25 points, nine assists, six rebounds a game), so look for Derek Harper--a better physical match-up than Derek Fisher--to get a majority of the playing time against him.