O’Neal Sparks Listless Lakers

Back in the town where there’s no question he can coach, coax and communicate--it says so right there on the banner hanging in the rafters of the United Center--Phil Jackson arrived dragging a Laker team that sometimes plays hard and sometimes doesn’t, but consistently confounds him.

Michael versus Scottie? Please. Dennis Rodman? Choirboy.

Those years looked simple compared to time spent with these Lakers, where the disagreements are blood feuds and star players tend to take biting criticism kind of personally. Kobe Bryant, who has a strained left ankle, did not play, for the seventh time in eight games.

The Lakers beat Jackson’s old Chicago Bulls, 100-88, on Thursday night, but only because the Bulls are so desperately terrible. The Lakers remained in second place, a game behind the Sacramento Kings, in the Pacific Division, but moved into third place in the Western Conference, ahead of Utah.

Other than Shaquille O’Neal, who scored 39 points and took 10 rebounds, the Lakers appeared only marginally interested, particularly on defense, and the game turned only when the Bulls stopped hitting the open jump shots the Lakers granted them.

Jackson said the Lakers were emotionally vacant because the arena’s atmosphere is deadly dull, and no one denied the new place has the feel of a Jiffy Lube waiting room without the three-month-old Car and Driver magazines.

What does not totally grip the Lakers makes them vulnerable, and so they led the NBA’s worst team--playing without Ron Mercer, no less--by five points at halftime, at which point the Lakers had three fewer rebounds than the Bulls.

“It’s a difficult place to play,” Jackson said. “There’s so many people and they’re not energized. It’s just flat in that arena right now, and it’s really noticeable as a player. I told them they’d have to generate their own energy in the course of this game. The crowd’s pretty flat out there. At halftime they got their energy back and did some good things.”

The Lakers, not the crowd, and mostly because O’Neal ground through Brad Miller, Jake Voskuhl and Dalibor Bagaric with only the slightest effort. He made 13 of 17 field-goal attempts and might have had an exceptional scoring game had he not missed nine of 22 free throws.

As it was, O’Neal was unstoppable despite Bull Coach Tim Floyd’s orders to hammer him on every possession and the referees’ refusal to allow O’Neal the same aggressiveness on defense. He was called for a flagrant foul in the third quarter for applying the very same tactics that batter him nightly.

“It’s just another day at the office,” O’Neal said. “I didn’t even feel it.”

O’Neal and Brian Shaw took technical fouls arguing against O’Neal’s flagrant foul.

“They just beat the hell out of him,” Shaw said of the preferred defense against O’Neal. “I took it as my duty at that time to take up for the big fella.”

Before the game, Jackson said the 50-26 Lakers needed to win out--six games are left in the regular season--for optimum home-court advantage in the playoffs.

“We almost have to run the season to get into the position we want to be, or at least hoped to be when we started the season,” Jackson said. “I think we could win our division if we did that. It’s a tall chore, but one we still want to attempt.”

Jackson entered the arena and smiled and waved to the people who adore him. He helps represent their six championships. The Bulls might win no more than twice that many games this season. So, the Chicago fans like to see him come in. Jackson seemed glad to be here. It’s been a long season, after all, even for him.

“We haven’t been able to put together two, three games in a row that have given us any kind of indication,” Jackson said. “The thing that makes us feel good about the playoffs is that somebody’s going to have to beat us. To beat the champions is always a tough proposition, to beat this team consecutively I think is something that is a lot different than it was a few years ago. It takes four--or three--games to go out of a series. We know we’ve got something here, even though we don’t perform the same way every night.”

When a Chicago reporter asked him about this L.A. gig he has, Jackson said, “It’s OK, you know. It’s a good job.”

And, the differences between the storms of Chicago and L.A.?

“It’s not a whole lot different,” he said. “It’s still making the players tend to the system, execution, you know, getting them ready for ballgames, trying to keep relations good with the team and teammates.”

Then, again, “L.A.’s a gossip town. They like to gossip.”

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Sacramento 92, Utah 86

Kings overcome a 21-point deficit and drop the Jazz into a fourth-place tie with the Dallas Mavericks in the Western Conference. D12