Harris Gives Team a Big Thumbs Down

Del Harris stood on the balcony, then filed a devastating, attention-getting (he hopes) review of the performance he witnessed below.

Abiding by the rules that prohibit direct communication between players and coach, but admittedly sending a message with his words, the Laker coach on Thursday slammed the effort exhibited by his players during Thursday’s informal workout.

“What I failed to see was evidence of a team that is pushing one another because they’re on a mission,” said Harris, who watched the workout from the balcony with assistants Kurt Rambis and Bill Bertka, after the NBA ruled that coaches could attend--but not participate in--the workouts.

“To this point all we’ve done the last couple years is talk ‘mission,’ and this year we’ve got to walk it. I think it should start now, where they’re pushing one another to excel even in these informal workouts. And I just didn’t see that.”

Harris said he wonders if the retirement of Michael Jordan, and the probable breakup of the Chicago Bulls, has caused his talented but sometimes unfocused team to assume too much.

“If our response to Jordan retiring is, ‘This makes it easy for us,’ [then] we’re dead,” Harris said. “We’ve got no chance. If that’s our response, we might as well mail it in.

“I’m afraid our guys could be hearing so many voices that, ‘It’s you, it’s you, it’s you. . . .’

“If today’s work is indicative of our commitment to be the one to step through the door, we’ve got a lot of rethinking to do.”

Harris said there was no talking on defense. There were layups at both sides of the floor, as if it were just another bad pickup game, players walking back in transition.

“Maybe I just caught them on a bad day,” Harris said. “It’s frustrating, to tell you the truth. There’s nothing I can do about it. It actually just made me feel bad. I may just send an assistant coach tomorrow and just wait until we can actually get to work. . . .

“I want to believe that they want the championship this year, after being one of the top teams in the league now the last three years, that the moment has arrived, we should recognize this as the time to step on through.”

Harris acknowledged that he wants his players to see his words and to be challenged by them, with training camp scheduled to start sometime next week and the regular season on Feb. 5.

Plus, there is a strong presumption that Laker Executive Vice President Jerry West is about to acquire one or two key players once the labor deal is signed, so the lineup may be altered quickly.

Center Shaquille O’Neal, before Harris’ statements, said he thought everything was going fairly well at the workouts.

“Everybody just has to be ready on the 18th [for training camp, which probably will be pushed back to least the 19th],” O’Neal said.

“This is just . . . everybody playing, scratching, getting ready. This is helpful, but it also means nothing. We ain’t going to win [anything] here, we ain’t going to lose [anything] here.”

Laker Notes

The Lakers on Thursday completed plans for their training camp, which will be located at UC Santa Barbara, though the start date is predicated on the formal agreement of the labor deal. There are also tentative plans for home-and-home exhibition games with the Clippers on Jan. 29 and 30.