View From The Other Side

The Lakers aren’t that good in many of the same ways the Michael Jordan Chicago Bulls weren’t that good. Ron Harper, the point guard for both teams, doesn’t shoot well, can’t create space for himself and is no one’s example of a bulldog defender. A dozen years and a major knee surgery ago, he was lightning quick.

He’s 36 now and not quick at all.

Harper continues to play because he knows what not to do. He doesn’t dribble excessively or waste time before he feeds the ball to Shaquille O’Neal. He won’t often look for a jumper because he knows that Coach Phil Jackson wants him to pass the ball so that Kobe Bryant or Glen Rice can shoot the jumper instead.

The Lakers play a three-man game and it is because Jackson has made the other nine men on the roster compliant with the concept that the Lakers are going to steamroll the Suns.

Harper probably couldn’t play for 20 or 25 NBA teams any longer, and he wouldn’t start for anybody but the Lakers. Yet he is going to be one of those who bullies the Suns and ultimately helps bury them in the next few days.

When Harper is introduced as a starter at Staples Center, he stands next to another fossil, A.C. Green. You and I assumed Green retired a few years ago when he went to Dallas and disappeared.

He’s the guy standing in the corner, two feet from Dyan Cannon and Glen Frey, watching O’Neal dunk over Luc Longley.

If you analyze it on paper, the Suns have better players than Harper, Green, Derek Fisher, Rick Fox, Robert Horry and Brian Shaw. So do most NBA teams, and especially those remaining in the playoffs.

But nobody has three like O’Neal, Bryant and Rice.

O’Neal and Bryant have been so good that it hasn’t really mattered that Rice has slumped. The Lakers don’t need Rice to score 26 a night the way he used to in Charlotte. Stay loose. Hit a few three-point shots at crunch time. O’Neal and Bryant will take it from there.

The last time one NBA team had the league’s two best players, Jordan and Scottie Pippen, they were so good that it obscured just how bad their center (Longley) was. The Lakers are reprising that role, making Fox and Harper and Green look better than they are.

The irony is that the Suns were enticed by the Bulls’ success. They paid Longley $32.5 million, installed him at center and pointed him toward the playoffs.

Even in the NBA, what goes around comes around.