Groggy Lakers Bruised, Used and Confused

Quick, somebody, the smelling salts.

Lakers? Lakers? Wake up. Easy now. Open those eyes.

There you go. Nice and slow. Don’t try to move too quickly.

Oh, man. That bruise on your face looks bad. And in the shape of Scottie Pippen’s shoe?

Careful. Keep that neck still. Strange. Each of those scratch marks is about as long as a Brian Grant dreadlock.

Stay still, Lakers. What? You want to talk?

Wait, let us pull those red headbands out of your throat.

Now, what are you trying to say?

What happened?

You don’t remember what happened?

C’mon. Monday night, Game 2 of the Western Conference finals, the Portland Trail Blazers win, 106-77, evening the series at one game apiece?

You still don’t remember?

OK, try this.

Portland shakes that first-game ringing from its ears, climbs through the ropes, stares you in the eye, sticks its head in the middle of that pretty gold, and drops you in your backyard like a diseased fir.

Knocks you all the way to this weekend, all the way back to Portland, where you must play the Trail Blazers in Games 3 and 4.

Incidentally, did they hit you so hard you forgot, you have played four road games in the playoffs and lost three?

And surely you realize, for the first time in the playoffs, you must win on the road to win a series?

Now do you remember?

Easy, easy. Don’t try to get up. Those three lumps on your side are nasty. From a distance, they look like Rasheed Wallace’s glare.

That glare that only irritated the referees apparently, um, leveled you.

OK, so what’s the last thing you can recall?

Halftime?

That makes sense. You were trailing by three points, but it was a brave deficit, seeing as you played much of the second quarter without foul-riddled Shaquille O’Neal.

Ron Harper was the your third-leading scorer. A.C. Green was the game’s co-leader in offensive rebounds for the game. Your reserves had actually outscored the Portland reserves. A brave deficit.

Say what?

After that, everything went black?

It figures. You got hit a few times to start the third quarter, then you did the strangest thing with your hands.

Honestly, we can’t remember the last time, in the middle of a battle, that we’ve seen you do this.

You wearily dropped them to your side.

And right about then, midway through the quarter, Steve Smith pummeled you with six consecutive points against foul-plagued Kobe Bryant.

And down you fell.

The Staples Center fans were too stunned to boo, too confused to offer encouraging cheers.

At the end of a quarter in which you were outscored, 28-8, there was only eerie silence.

It was the kind of silence last heard around here when you were swept from the playoffs last year, but easy, easy, we can talk about that later.

What? You don’t believe us?

Stay still. Your elbows are full of these things that can best be described as, well, Bonzi burns.

Here, we brought some Trail Blazers over for verification.

“We came out tonight with more of a sense of urgency than the Lakers,” said Smith. “We knew we had to get this game.”

You’re still blurry about urgency? Let us put it another way.

The Trail Blazers had a 49-34 rebounding edge, including a 12-6 edge on the offensive boards. In the paint, they outscored the team with the game’s best big man. By 22 points.

“You all probably thought after Saturday that we were a bad team, real overrated,” said Bonzi Wells. “Tonight, we knew had to come at them hard.”

Who is Bonzi Wells? You don’t remember? By tomorrow morning, you will.

He came off the bench to score 12 points with six rebounds and two assists, better total numbers than all but two Lakers.

Actually, he didn’t come off the bench, he flew off the bench, and down the lane, and directly into the face of a Laker team that seemed stunned the Trail Blazers could treat a one-game deficit with such audacity.

We think that was him. Actually, it was all of them.

“We were not intimidated at all,” Wells said. “We know we’ve got some guys who can make some plays. When Scottie, Rasheed and Smitty are all playing like that, we can’t be beat.”

When he said, “make some plays,” he meant this:

At one point in the third quarter, Brian Grant battled and knocked a loose ball out of bounds off the Lakers twice in a row.

At another point, Greg Anthony knocked Derek Fisher to the ground while dribbling around them, then turned and threw the ball to Wallace, who turned and threw in a three-pointer.

What’s that?

So what now?

You’re asking us?

Well, you guys have proven everything this season except an ability to take a roundhouse.

We always thought this was only because, to be honest, nobody has ever hit you that hard.

Consider yourself hit.

Consider yourself facing the test that will either make you NBA champions, or more bad memories.

We will see how Shaquille O’Neal plays on the road with three big bodies pummeling him. We will see how Kobe Bryant plays while being tested by two or three Trail Blazers on each end of the court.

We will see if Glen Rice is still here. We’ll see if the Robert Horry of recent days was just our imagination. We will see if Brian Shaw and Rick Fox and the rest of the Laker reserves can refute all the experts.

We will see . . . what? What’s that?

You want to talk? From the mouth of Bryant?

Go ahead.

“This is good for us,” Bryant said. “It just builds character and makes us stronger down the road.”

There there. You’ll be feeling better soon.

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.

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Turning Point

Miserable shooting cost the Lakers in the third quarter as Portland expanded a three-point halftime lead to 23. Field-oal shooting by quarter: