What in the Blazes? It’s Different Wallace

Rasheed Wallace went off on the opponent this time.

The Lakers were just off.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Robert Horry said, meaning in his eight-year career, not only the last 3 1/2 with the Lakers.

The Trail Blazers needed this badly.

The Lakers were just bad.

“It was real bad,” Shaquille O’Neal.

It was the third quarter Monday night. The time that Wallace turned combustible in another way and, instead, all the Lakers got ejected from the game.

They were outscored, 28-8.

They were outscored, 20-0, in one span.

They tied a team record for postseason ineptitude.

They were single-handedly outscored by two Trail Blazers, Wallace and Steve Smith, who had 11 points each.

They were outshot, 57.0% to 13.3%.

They went the final 6:03 of the period without a basket.

Of course, they also went the final 12:00 of the quarter--otherwise known as the entire quarter--with two baskets, so at least the highlights didn’t come all at once.

A slam dunk by O’Neal with 9:13 remaining.

A three-pointer by Brian Shaw with 6:04 left, off an O’Neal assist.

And one free throw by O’Neal with 6:48 left, two by Kobe Bryant with :01.1 showing.

“I thought that, more or less, it was our own desperation,” Coach Phil Jackson said. “We got a little desperate out there in the middle of that quarter.”

Said Horry: “You don’t know why it happened or where it came from. You just want to cut it out of your system.”

Or the record books. Only one other Los Angeles Laker team had ever struggled so mightily for offense in the playoffs, the group that also scored eight points April 9, 1972, against the Milwaukee Bucks.

The 32 points, including the fourth-quarter windfall that followed, wasn’t much better than the record for a half either, slightly ahead of the 28 versus Milwaukee on April 7, 1974.

This Laker team trailed only 56-51 when the trap door opened.

Portland scored on six consecutive possessions, even making five consecutive shots at one point, leading to a 14-0 rally. Smith had seven of the points. That made it 70-51.

Wallace missed a short fall-away, then Stacey Augmon missed a jumper from the free throw line, but the Trail Blazers heated up again. Actually, a Trail Blazer did.

Wallace connected on a 26-footer from the left side, a three-pointer as Horry ran at him.

On the next possession--after O’Neal missed two free throws in a quarter in which he would go one of four from the line--Wallace hit a 25-footer from the right side, steps away from the Laker bench. Another three-pointer. He turned and gave the seated opponents a look.

The charge was at 20-0. The Lakers went nine possessions in a row without a point, not getting so much as a timeout from their coach as a bail out.

“I left them to hang out to dry a little too long and try to find their own way back out of that morass,” Jackson said, “and they just couldn’t find their way out.”

It took Bryant’s free throws to end the drought and the rally, after the game had already been ended.

“I just saw us playing well,” Trail Blazer Bonzi Wells said. “I just saw us playing the best basketball, maybe of the whole season.”

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Third Rocked

The third quarter of Game 2 was pivotal. The Lakers matched an all-time team-low for points in a quarter in the playoffs, and Rasheed Wallace and the Portland Trail Blazers had their best quarter of the series:

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Category Portland Wallace Lakers Points 28 11 8 Field goals made-attempted 11-19 4-5 2-15 Three-point shots made-attempted 4-7 3-3 1-6 Layups made-attempted 4-5 0-0 0-2 Rebounds (Team) 14 (1) 5 5 (5) Turnovers 1 0 7

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