FOUL PLAY?

When a team as talented as the Portland Trail Blazers has no better recourse than to turn the NBA’s most appealing playoff matchup into a free-throw exhibition, it’s time to change the rules.

Taking chances with a bad free-throw shooter is one thing. Torturing every basketball fan in attendance and in the television viewing audience is another.

The league needs to do everything it can to deter intentional fouls away from the ball. Give the fouled team a free throw plus possession.

Give us a reason to watch.

When Portland started fouling Shaquille O’Neal--no matter where he was, no matter what he was doing--for a 3 1/2-minute stretch in the fourth quarter of Game 1 Saturday, it did the impossible. It made the scoring-challenged series between the Heat and Knicks look like an Alvin Ailey dance concert by comparison.

Saturday’s free-throw parade was about basketball as much as an extra-point competition would be an accurate gauge of football. If ever a game deserved to be turned off, it was this one. Where’s “Heidi” when you need her? Portland didn’t play defense, the Lakers didn’t play offense.

And there was nothing the officials or anyone else could do to change it.

“What we did is totally within the rules of the game,” Portland Coach Mike Dunleavy said.

Dunleavy is right, and that is what’s wrong.

Whether it was Steve Smith giving Shaq love taps on his chest or Brian Grant grabbing him by the arms, the Trail Blazers fouled O’Neal as soon as the Lakers had possession, even when O’Neal was 50 feet away from the ball, minding his own business in the corner. Their only punishment was watching O’Neal step to the free-throw line. That’s not a penalty, that’s the NBA equivalent of a sigh of relief.

Dunleavy called Shaq’s 50-50 free-throw shooting “a random event,” as if it were a math problem.

Come to think of it, watching a couple of nerds work out algebra equations on a chalkboard would be more exciting than the fourth quarter of Game 1.

The Trail Blazers fouled O’Neal seven consecutive times until he came out for a rest. After he returned, they fouled him four times without him even touching the ball.

Such plays are treated as normal fouls until the final two minutes of the fourth quarter and in overtime. When a player is fouled before the ball is inbounded or away from the ball during those times, any player in the game can shoot the free throw, and the offended team is awarded the ball out of bounds.

Rod Thorn, the NBA’s senior vice president of operations, appearing on NBC Sunday, said the rules competition committee would consider extending that rule for the entire fourth quarter when it meets in June.

That’s the least the league can do. They should put the rule in effect for the entire game, just in case the threat of accumulating too many personal fouls isn’t enough of a deterrent.

In a conversation on Saturday, Ed T. Rush, the NBA’s supervisor of officials, said that, technically, a player jostling for position or trying to fight through a screen could be called for an away-from-the-play foul.

The rules would have to be specific. An away-from-the-play foul could be called whenever a player is fouled while he is not making a move to the ball or the basket, or attempting to establish position. In other words, a player standing still on the other side of the court could not be fouled.

Yes, it’s a judgment call. But if the referees can be entrusted to determine flagrant fouls (the rule book definition, “unnecessary”, offers a lot of leeway), they can show the good sense to make these decisions.

As it stands now, coaches under pressure to win games can’t be trusted to follow the spirit of the current rules.

“It’s totally fair,” Dunleavy said of his strategy. “It’s not dirty, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a high-percentage play. You play percentage basketball.”

But there are ways to exploit poor free-throw shooting without ruining the game. There should be drawbacks for a player’s inability to master one of the fundamentals, and there already are. It’s punishment enough if the Lakers can’t pass to the NBA’s top scorer and field-goal percentage leader in crunch time.

The Trail Blazers should be content to let the Lakers try their luck with other players. If the ball goes into O’Neal, by all means foul away.

But by going with the Winston Churchill approach (We shall foul on the beaches, we shall foul on the landing grounds, we shall foul on the fields, and in the streets, we shall foul in the hills...), Dunleavy is sending a message to his players that if they fall behind, he doesn’t believe they are good enough to beat the Lakers by playing defense and scoring quickly.

Portland is going to have to win games at some point, not simply wait for O’Neal to lose them at the line.

First, they can start playing real ball and stop this affront to the essence of the game.

Laker Coach Phil Jackson said his assistant Tex Winter is “frothing at the bit next to me. ‘Hey, they’ve got to do something about this. This isn’t what basketball’s meant to be. This isn’t what fouling is meant to be.’ ”

Dunleavy has threatened to use the tactic again if necessary. It’s too late to stop him for these playoffs, but it isn’t too early to get the changes in motion to keep us from suffering through this again next season.

*

J.A. Adande can be reached at his e-mail address: j.a.adande@latimes.com