View From The Other Side

Amid these inhumane 94 hours of public analysis between Games 2 and 3, it’s clear the Trail Blazers’ next mission is to avoid overlooking the lowly, hapless, hopeless, green Lakers, who apparently misplaced their prowess sometime last Sunday.

Portland cannot afford to start pondering Reggie Miller’s three-point marksmanship or New York’s referee conspiracy just because Los Angeles’ triangle offense sailed into a Bermuda Triangle defense and began to resemble a rhombus. Sports “history,” as we always dubiously call it, is littered with the tears of the overconfident.

So be nice, please. Everyone needs to be nice to these desperate, overmatched, moribund, deeply flawed Lakers who, we now learn, were never phenomenal to begin with. Give them their “respect” (to utilize yet another dubious cliche), for they did win 67 games this regular season, even though the legendary Bulls, of course, won 72.

You talk about shortcomings.

Laker guard Kobe Bryant observes that one Laker loss tends to draw “Armageddon” treatment, but I don’t see what he means. All Game 2 evoked around Los Angeles was that the Lakers seem short of sands in the hourglass; don’t always show up ready to play; lack a point guard who can fracture the defense; lack the patience to make the extra pass; lack a calming floor influence (unlike in the 1985 finals, when they recovered famously from losing, 148-114, in Game 1 in Boston); can’t counter Scottie Pippen’s knowledge of the triangle; can’t cope when a foe goes octopus on Shaquille O’Neal; rely on supporting actors (including an aching Glen Rice) to hit tricky shots that figure to grow trickier when Portland fans rattle the basket as they (wink) did to Bryon Russell; employ a coach so serene he can sit there as if the bench is a church pew and an 0-20 cyclone is the sermon; and, to top it off, have to do something they have not proved they can do: win in the playoffs on the road where they are 1-3 in 2000 and 2-8 the last five series across three seasons.

That’s all.

Try not to let your pity consume you.

So somber was the day-after film study, Laker Coach Phil Jackson lagged on an appointment with reporters by 75 minutes. He was not fined, perhaps out of pity.

When he emerged, the upstart coach with the six rings seasoned his remarks with a plea for more illegal-defense whistles. This was unsurprising in one sense--all NBA playoff games nowadays include five stages: four quarters plus the next morning’s complaint about officiating--but curious in another: It’s the Lakers doing the fretting. At least when it’s the Lakers, we are spared the usual market-size conspiracy theory, if not our deepest sympathies.