Road Test

The Trail Blazer trap is set, due to snap shut sometime this evening, triggered by 20,000 shouts and 100,000 volts of defense.

There will be no air to breathe in Game 3 tonight, no peace for jangled nerves, no rest for the weary, the angry, or the triple-teamed among them.

There will be Scottie Pippen, running the triangle defense.

There will be Rasheed Wallace, running down the ball and roaring to the Rose Garden crowd.

There will be the Trail Blazers, reaching to sweep the two games in Portland starting tonight, which would give them a huge 3-1 lead in the Western Conference finals after the teams split Games 1 and 2 at Staples Center.

And for all these reasons, and a few more that are even harder to explain, the Lakers say they are ready to play the best basketball of this long and eventful season when the best basketball is desperately needed.

“We’re kind of upset that we didn’t play as good of a game in Game 2 as we did in Game 1,” said Shaquille O’Neal, held to 23 points in the second game by a furious Portland double- and triple-team commitment.

“Now this is a true test for us. We’ve been stepping up to tests all year, so this is another one we have to step up to.”

Facing elimination by Sacramento in the first playoff round, after a wounding, 13-point loss in Game 4, the Lakers destroyed the Kings at Staples Center in the deciding Game 5.

Angered by a 19-point walloping by Phoenix in Game 4 of the second-round series, the Lakers cut the Suns to pieces to clinch the series in Game 5.

Now they have had three days to do nothing but stew over their 29-point loss in Game 2 (the worst of the season), and plot the revival.

“I think it’s a characteristic of this team that when they’re really serious and determined to play basketball, they’re very good,” Coach Phil Jackson said.

He did not add, or need to, that for unexplained reasons this postseason, the Lakers have also turned in several of their most frazzled performances, especially on the road, where they are 1-3.

But the Lakers also have fond memories of their last trip to the Rose Garden, after seven consecutive regular-season defeats in Portland, when they knocked off the Trail Blazers, 90-87, on Feb. 29, in a game Jackson called the biggest regular-season matchup he’d seen.

“I think it was a situation where we wanted that game very bad,” guard Derek Fisher said of the meeting, when both teams carried 11-game winning streaks and had NBA-best 45-11 records. “I think we accepted the challenge that was placed on us, not only by them, but by other people.

“I think at that time of the season, a lot of people felt like they were a better basketball team than us. I think we really felt if we could go up there and get that win, we’d not only silence other people but it would give us more confidence and we continued to just play tremendous basketball after that.

“So we’re kind of in that same situation again, where people are starting to question our abilities as a basketball team and we can go up there and silence them.”

Said Rick Fox, who provided key defense in that game, when the Lakers held Portland to only 40.4% shooting: “We played a desperation game in a sense that knowing that the margin for error was very small and that we had to execute our offense and play the defense almost flawless to beat them on their court. We did that.”

Jackson this week at first joked about the Feb. 29 victory, saying that since it came on “Leap Year Day, that means it only happens once every four years.”

But he pointed out that the Lakers can take confidence out of that memory because of the methodical way they played that game, and the knowledge that the Trail Blazers are beatable at home.

“We got them in what we considered our game pace,” Jackson said. “They’re now just using attack basketball, they’re just coming at us, something they didn’t do during the course of the year . . .

“They’re just playing, you know, drive the ball down the throats, see if they can’t get Shaq in foul trouble, see if they won’t make the foul calls on Shaq and then put us in jeopardy that way, or Kobe [Bryant], one or the other.”

Against Portland’s active double-teaming, Bryant has turned in his two lowest scoring outings of the playoffs in Games 1 and 2 (averaging 12.5 points).

Jackson said it’s more a matter of Bryant’s confidence with his shot than anything the Trail Blazer defense is doing.

“Kobe’s got to shoot the basketball,” Jackson said. “He’s got to be able to shoot it.

“They’re playing him to drive, and he’s got to be able to pull up and shoot jumpers.”

There have been no major offensive changes put in after the Game 2 struggle, the Lakers said, only emphasis on running the triangle offense with more aggression and confidence.

In Game 2, with O’Neal swamped, Bryant denied his usual driving space and the other Lakers unable to take up the scoring slack or too easily spooked by Pippen’s roving defense, the offense froze in place.

“We’ve got to use all our options, instead of just one,” forward Robert Horry said.

“I think we weren’t really ready for what Scottie was going to do to us. Now we’ve kind of prepared, we know what he’s going to do, how he’s going to try to interrupt our offense, slow our rhythm, so we’ve got a lot of other changes when he does try to do it.

“We’ve got in our heads, what Scottie does, you do the opposite.”

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Follow-Up Call

How Lakers have fared in games after a loss this season:

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Record after a loss 14-4 Record after a home loss 4-1 Record after a home loss with a road game 0-1 Number of times losing back-to-back games 4 Average point differential of losses 11.6 Average point differential in games after a loss +14.7 Average points allowed by Lakers in losses 101.7 Average points allowed by Lakers in games after losses 86.7

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NBA PLAYOFFS

Game 3

Lakers at Portland

6 tonight, Channel 4

Best-of-seven series tied, 1-1

LAKER NOTES, PAGE 8

TRAIL BLAZER NOTES, PAGE 8

PLAYOFF STATISTICS, PAGE 8

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EASTERN FINALS

Pacers lead series, 2-0

INDIANA: 88

NEW YORK: 84

Reggie Miller scores the winning points and Dale Davis grabs the biggest rebound, but Patrick Ewing’s foot injury is probably the worst news for the Knicks. Page 7