Bryant Offers Interesting Take on Series

One team in this climactic Western Conference final series is bigger, stronger, deeper, swifter and favored to win it all.

The other team is the Lakers. At least, that’s the pre-showdown lowdown from the Lakers, and, perhaps with a few winks, they’re sticking with it.

“We all know they’re a superior athletic team than we are,” Kobe Bryant said of the Portland Trail Blazers on Wednesday, a day after the Lakers knocked out the Phoenix Suns and Portland eliminated the Utah Jazz to set up this long-awaited matchup between the two teams with the best regular-season records in the NBA.

“As a matter of fact, they have better players than we do. But we know that it’s going to be a close [series]--every single game is going to be a close game. . . .

“It’s good playing a team like Portland, because they’re going . . . to bring the best out of us, especially mentally, because physically, we can’t match up with them.”

So the Lakers, who won 67 regular-season games, who have the near-unanimous most valuable player in the league in Shaquille O’Neal, who dispatched the Sacramento Kings and the Suns in only one fewer game than it took Portland to finish off Minnesota and Utah, aren’t physically able to match up with the Trail Blazers, who went 59-23?

“Hell no,” Bryant said. “Well, we’ve got Shaq--Shaq will match up with about four of them on his own. But, I mean, they’re a more athletic team than we are and they’re bigger than we are.

“But we beat teams with execution. . . . I think we learned our lesson in this Phoenix series--because they were a much more athletic team than we were.

“And we kind of relied on old habits and got our butts kicked up there in Phoenix [in Game 4]. We weren’t boxing out, we weren’t doing the little things execution-wise to beat a team that’s more athletic than we are.”

Putting aside the potential motivational aspects of this Laker point of view, the Trail Blazers are undeniably larger and deeper--they can send waves of athletic big men at O’Neal--and more versatile--they can get significant scoring from Scottie Pippen, Damon Stoudamire, Steve Smith, Rasheed Wallace or about five other players.

Laker Coach Phil Jackson did point out that Portland kept backup center Joe Kleine (who committed seven fouls and scored two points in two games against the Lakers) off their playoff roster, which denies Coach Mike Dunleavy one more big fouler against O’Neal.

But, in contrast to the Portland weapons, in the first two rounds of the playoffs the Lakers have been unable to get consistent scoring from anyone other than Bryant and O’Neal.

“They’re pretty deep, one through 11 or 12. . . . You move on through 14, actually,” said Jackson, who has repeatedly called Portland “the best team money can buy,” not always in a nice way.

“That’s the thing that will be an intriguing part of this series: Does quantity beat quality?”

Portland and the Lakers split their four regular-season meetings, with each team winning once on the other’s home floor.