Lakers in a Three-Fall

By TIM KAWAKAMI

May 23, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Summertime in Lakerland is maybe a game away, one last chance to see tall, talented men run fast, jump high and crash at the finish line.

One game away. One more turnover-filled, defense-depleted, screw-up-the-game plan, San Antonio Spur-dominated stretch run away.

One more stumbling step from the great yawning off-season.

On Saturday, when the Lakers’ 103-91 Game 3 loss to San Antonio was over, when they had finished giving up the final 13 points of the game, the locker room cleared out as quickly as smoke out of a bottle, as swiftly as a capacity crowd at the Great Western Forum sprinting for the exits.

The victory put the Spurs ahead in this Western Conference semifinal series, 3-0, a deficit from which no NBA playoff team has ever recovered.

Game 4 is scheduled for today, and the Spurs may gently lay their heads and sweep.

“It’s a shame that we’re down, 0-3, in this series,” the Lakers’ Shaquille O’Neal said softly in his brief stint before the media. “A shame.”

One more time, the Lakers implode on schedule.

And one more time, they are playing for respect, not for a championship, in a playoff series.

“You don’t have any choice,” Kobe Bryant said. “You’re at the bottom, you know what I mean? There’s nothing else to do.

“You’ve got to keep fighting. You have no choice. I don’t want to go on vacation.”

This time, as in the previous games of this series--and all those games in two previous disintegrating playoff defeats to Utah--the Lakers were within reach of victory.

Until the bell lap began, until the difference between winning and losing was not talent, but tenacity, toughness and teamwork.

The Lakers went ahead, 91-90, on Robert Horry’s three-point basket with 1:55 left, the crowd roared, the Lakers smiled, and maybe they were back in this series.

Then Jaren Jackson made a jump shot, Avery Johnson made another, the Spurs kept running their offense beautifully and finding open shots, and the Lakers discovered that, once again, their array of offensive firepower fizzled when it counted most.

No fireworks, only frowns.

“I think we make enough money to go down fighting,” the Lakers’ Rick Fox said. “I don’t think you let it come to a situation where they’ve got a chance to win that game today.

“I’ll say it again, we all in this locker room make enough money to go down fighting. You don’t wait ‘til Game 4 to go down fighting.”

Will Game 4 be a fight?

“It better be a fight,” Fox said.

It better be a lot of things, but it probably won’t, not with this team’s history for playoff fades, and its recent run of strangled play at crunch time.

In Game 1, it was O’Neal being taken away by the Spurs’ aggressive double-teams, something the Lakers have not quite figured out. O’Neal scored 22 points Saturday (and had 15 rebounds) but scored only five points in the fourth quarter and zero in the last 4:30.

“We always talk about it,” O’Neal said. “But we don’t get the ball in the hands of the right people and we don’t take smart shots. And we know we’re just not doing it.”

In Game 2, it was Bryant’s two missed free throws and the team’s three mental miscues in the final 18 seconds, clearing the way for Spur forward Tim Duncan to win the game with a jump hook.

The mistakes kept coming in Game 3, and so did Duncan, who scored 37 points, seemed to touch the ball in good position whenever he wanted--unlike O’Neal--and made 19 of 23 free throws.

“I think whatever you want to write,” said Spur Coach Gregg Popovich, when asked about Duncan’s performance, “will describe it better than I can.”

Glen Rice threw away an inbounds pass with 2:21 left, Bryant dribbled out of bounds on a fastbreak with 33.2 seconds left, and the Lakers’ ability to rotate out of double-teams seemed to evaporate with each passing second.

In Game 3, it was Jackson scorching the Lakers’ slow rotations for 22 points, Johnson emerging from a game-long slump, and general Laker frenzy down the stretch.

“They’re forcing us to do other things than what we have grown to be as a team,” Laker Coach Kurt Rambis said of the Spurs. “So now we’re having to stretch the boundaries of our team.

“And without the proper time it takes to throw in all of these plays and get all of the timing down so we can execute them properly, it’s very difficult to run them, especially when you need to run them.”

That did not mean that the Lakers played poorly the entire game. Actually, there were stretches of quality play, keyed by O’Neal’s rugged rebounding and Rice’s shooting run in the second and third quarters.

Rice finished with a team-high 24 points, but was two of eight in the fourth quarter. He was the primary man checking Jackson, who scored 13 points in the final quarter.

“We focus on the fact that we have to be an executing, defensive-minded team,” Fox said. “And when we get a couple-point lead, six-point lead, then all of a sudden we want to pull away from that mind-set.

“It’s happened throughout the series. Being at home doesn’t guarantee you a win. They came in obviously up 2-0, loose, free, confident. And we came out and didn’t match that. We played as if we were up, 2-0.”

Said Rice: “I think down the stretch, we try to hit the home run. We try to force the issue, and you’re going to have turnovers.

“On the defensive end, you want it to be perfect, and I think at times we get stuck in the mud trying to make it perfect. Hopefully, we can find a solution by [today].”

And there really is no other answer for this Laker team, other than marching forward, into either a very complicated off-season or at least one more game.

One last game.

“Same old cliche stuff,” Rambis said, when asked how he approaches Game 4. “Got nothing to hold back tomorrow. We can either go down or we can go down in history and try and come back.”

Said Rice: “It seems impossible, but it’s not. We’ve got all the motivation in the world. We lose, it’s going to be a long summer.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

NBA PLAYOFFS

LAKERS vs. SAN ANTONIO

Spurs lead best-of-seven series, 3-0

GAME 1: San Antonio 87, Lakers, 81

GAME 2: San Antonio 79, Lakers, 76

GAME 3: San Antonio 103, Lakers, 91

GAME 4: Today at Forum; 2:30 p.m., Channel 4

GAME 5*: Tuesday at San Antonio, TBA

GAME 6*: Thursday at Forum, TBA

GAME 7*: Saturday at San Antonio, TBA