Portland Has Technical Difficulties

Many of the Lakers say they like Rasheed Wallace. A good guy when the gym is not full, the subject is light and the games aren’t called by those three middle-aged idiots with comb-overs.

You know Wallace’s type. Soft-spoken, interesting. A North Carolina Tar Heel, by way of Philadelphia, in the days when a baby Kobe Bryant would sit in the bleachers and watch him play, the same jump shot, the same stringy strength, all game until some whistle-blower with an attitude starts poking around.

Oh, the game. Fadeaways, nasty stuff and not just on the block. He could spot you up too, you know, just let it go when the inside muscle’s too much, if only once one of the blind jerks could summon courage from a stomach otherwise swollen with corn dogs.

And while the Lakers find themselves sweating through strategy sessions because of what the rangy Wallace might do to them in a short series, they can’t be any more worried than the Portland Trail Blazers, who must be terrified by what he could do to them.

In a single season, Wallace has been assessed 41 technical fouls, an NBA record, leading to seven ejections. On Feb. 1, he threw a towel in referee Gary Benson’s face, drawing a two-game suspension and a $10,000 fine. Early this month, the Trail Blazers suspended him for “inappropriate game conduct,” and on Sunday, he hit teammate Arvydas Sabonis in the face with a towel, leading to another suspension.

On the bright side, Wallace could have beaten Sabonis with a chair. Or with a teammate. Just picked up Greg Anthony and throttled Sabonis with him.

In the worst of it, Anthony told the Oregonian newspaper, “I’d much prefer to have Rasheed getting technicals every night than for him to be a choirboy and not give us what he gives us. I’ve been here three years and in the playoffs he’s been our biggest player. He’s always played his best. He’s never cost us a game because of getting into it with an official.”

It only seems as if he spends as much time off the court as he does on it. In between the tantrums, Wallace averaged 19.2 points and 7.8 rebounds in 77 games. He averaged 28 points in four games against the Lakers, his highest total against all but the Orlando Magic, against whom he averaged 29.5 in two games.

Early in the season, long before all of the really strange stuff started, Mike Dunleavy looked at his Trail Blazers and wondered, aloud, if they “weren’t getting enough oxygen to their brains.”

He did not look directly at Wallace.

On Thursday afternoon, three days before they would begin a best-of-five series against the Trail Blazers, the Lakers only poked at the subject of Wallace, his temper, and what effect it might have.

Rick Fox, a former Tar Heel who considers Wallace a friend, laughed and said: “You’re talking to the wrong team to point fingers at dysfunction. We’ve had our own problems, really.”

He took a swing at it anyway.

“I think he prefers to play a little disturbed,” he said. “For him, it almost has to be personal, whether it is with the referees or with somebody else, that I think is where he draws his energy from, his attempt to fire himself up.

“I think we all change in the course of our careers. It takes some of us longer to find our way as professional basketball players. But I think in his case he’s going with what works for him and it’s hard to argue with the results you get from him on the basketball court.

“There are certain things that go with Rasheed, perhaps. But you’d rather have him than not have him. From what I’ve seen, he enjoys a little confrontation, a little verbal sparring, just to drum up the emotions of the game, to get himself fired up or angry. I think he needs that to play the way he does.”

Horace Grant, 35, gets the first defensive crack at Wallace, nine years younger. In times of exhaustion or foul trouble, Grant is spelled by Robert Horry. They’ve occasionally double-teamed Wallace, a strategy Coach Phil Jackson generally abhors.

Grant said he is above baiting Wallace into a temper tantrum.

“That’s a referee thing [for Wallace],” he said. “I don’t like to play games like that. I like to go out and play tough basketball. I mean, the only guy that can stop Rasheed is Rasheed.”

Jackson hopes not.

“With all players, everybody has a vulnerable spot,” he said. “Some players play beyond it with their confidence level. They’ve got enough of a cushion to go through adversity on the floor without losing their cool. But we’ve all seen players unravel at times. With this young man, he carries it on the edge of his sleeve all the time.

“It’s not like he’s got a cushion there. It’s just, like, there. But I have a good relationship with him from the All-Star game last year. He’s a player I think who’ll have a long, successful career in this league. His management of anger is something he’s going to have to deal with. You talk to 90% of the players in this league, they’ll tell you they get fouled every time they shoot. Yet that’s the game in the NBA, you have to play through getting fouled. So they’re all playing through that.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

LAKERS vs. PORTLAND

GAME 1

Sunday

at Lakers

2:30 p.m.

GAME 2

Thursday

at Lakers

7:30 p.m.

GAME 3

April 29

at Portland

2:30 p.m.

GAME 4

May 1

at Portland*

GAME 5

May 4

at Lakers*

* if necessary

*

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