Blame Game Is Amusing to Lakers

By TIM KAWAKAMI

April 25, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

In the key, in front of Vlade Divac or even a day after his 46-point Game 1 Sacramento King slamdance, Shaquille O’Neal doesn’t give ground.

He makes it shake. He owns large portions of it. He conducts regular one-man mosh pits on top of it. But he does not retreat from it, ever.

And on Monday, after hearing about King Coach Rick Adelman’s complaints that the Game 1 referees allowed him to get away with too much bodyslamming to position himself in the Laker offense, O’Neal heartily defended his ground.

“Adelman’s complaining about me?” O’Neal said, incredulously, after Monday’s light Laker workout at their El Segundo practice site. “Those are the rules.

“All right, fine, he can be an idiot. What Rick Adelman doesn’t want to do is wake me up, [by] crying and whining. He’ll wake me up.”

So, he tied his career playoff single-game scoring mark, but he is not yet awake?

“No,” O’Neal said.

O’Neal pointed out that this season the NBA adopted new rules that forbid defenders from grabbing cutters across the lane, which, he said, means that he has every right to leverage himself into the key.

So, the annual public playoff debate over officiating--and which team is getting the benefit of the doubt and clout--began in earnest, with both sides fixing a hard eye toward Game 2 Thursday at Staples Center.

Interestingly, in recent years, the Lakers and O’Neal have mostly been the complainers, not the accused, and you can flash back to the Game 1 loss at San Antonio last season, when O’Neal screamed at the officials after the game, then smashed a VCR in the Laker locker room.

Is it an indication of O’Neal’s and the Lakers’ loftier positions in the minds of officials and the league that this time the Lakers find themselves in a switched role?

The Kings after the game Sunday argued that their superstar, Chris Webber, picked up several cheap fouls on the post against Robert Horry, which cost Webber dearly, while O’Neal broadsided Divac and Scot Pollard at will.

Webber picked up his fifth foul toward the end of the third quarter when his arm banged into Horry’s head and shoulders while they jostled for position.

Webber protested loudly, earned a technical foul to the delight of the Staples Center crowd, then barely made it into the fourth quarter before fouling out for good, whistled for charging into Derek Fisher.

“I might talk a little bit about officiating myself, if I’m prodded enough,” Laker Coach Phil Jackson said Monday. “I mean, really they shot 35 foul shots to our what, 15 [actually 14]? . . .

“That’s a disparity you usually don’t see at home. . . . It looked to me early that they weren’t going to give any simple cheap fouls to Shaq, that Shaq was going to have to put the ball in the basket, and he was able to do that finally.

“There were just some funny things that happened; like the end of that third quarter [with Webber], it was almost nonsensical. I don’t think it boils down to refereeing as much as it just boiled down to who wanted the game more and who played with more intensity.”

O’Neal shot only five free throws on Sunday, making four of them.

Jackson, for his part, said that the Lakers were not intentionally trying to annoy Webber, though it did work out that way in Game 1.

“We’re not looking to exploit people and their mental stability out there on the floor--that’s not the way we want to play basketball,” Jackson said. “What we do want to do, we want to take his territory away from him.

“And so Robert was trying to make him detour and go somewhere else, and this year the league has done a real concerted effort to try and limit the offensive player from displacing the defense. So you have to work for your pivot position; you can’t just run somebody over. . . .

“Chris just has to handle those things. He’s capable of doing it. He’s an all-star, he knows how to do that.”

Horry, a veteran of two Houston Rocket championship teams, shrugged and said the complaints, responses and retorts are all part of the familiar NBA playoff routine.

“Sometimes you say things [so that] the refs read the papers just like the normal people and they go, ‘Hey, maybe we need to look at something,’ ” Horry said.

“A lot of times, it’s just talk, to try to get the ref to say, ‘Well, we’re going to try to get Shaq some fouls.’ ”

Horry was fingered by Webber as exaggerating the contact to get the whistle, but Horry said that Divac’s gestures and flinches against O’Neal were the true act.

“[If] you’re talking about floppers, Divac’s a master at flopping,” Horry said. “After a while, the refs get tired of you flopping. I don’t think any of the things that Shaq was doing [were wrong]. . . .

“He’s got a space to move in, and Shaq is so big that his space is bigger than the rest of ours. If you get in his way, you get in his way.

“It’s not like a thing that he’s doing offensive fouls, it’s what he’s been doing all year--just taking up his space. In this game of basketball, you have your little buffer zone where you can move. If you step in there, you either get hit, or you let the man score.”

Or in Divac and Pollard’s case, you do both.

In his last four games against the Kings, all Laker victories, O’Neal has averaged 40 points and an amazing 30 shots (he averaged 21 shots overall during the regular season).

Whatever the Kings are trying to do against him, clearly, is not working.

“My game is a game of tai chi,” O’Neal said, when asked if he might not be coming close to offensive fouls when he goes into the lane.

“I’m good enough to go around people, I don’t have to go through them. I’ll never have to go through Vlade Divac, period.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

THE SERIES

LAKERS vs. KINGS

Best of five

GAME 1

Lakers 117, Kings 107

GAME 2

Thursday at Staples Center, 7:30 p.m.,

Fox Sports Net