Time for Lakers to Shape Destiny

Even as the Pacific Division leaders continue to wait for the Lakers, who are in danger of taking more defeats into the All-Star break than they took into the playoffs last season, there are remedies being considered in the wake of yet another curious defeat.

General Manager Mitch Kupchak said Monday, 24 hours after a 103-92 loss to the Miami Heat, that the team is “underachieving,” and that he is more likely to pursue a trade by the Feb. 22 deadline because of it.

And the day after Kobe Bryant challenged his teammates to get in shape, Coach Phil Jackson revealed that Shaquille O’Neal has started a conditioning program designed to help him lose weight and gain stamina.

Finally, veteran Horace Grant, whose sore back forced him to sit out Sunday’s game against the Heat, said the Lakers never would be completely focused on retaining their championship until the Shaq-Kobe feud is settled.

If there seems to be a lot to do in less than three months, when the playoffs start and the expectations thicken, then that would explain the mood of the Lakers, who traveled to Seattle on Monday afternoon to play a SuperSonic team tonight they haven’t defeated in two previous tries.

“Everybody was a little angry, a little upset,” Bryant said. “That’s good. I’m glad that we are getting to this point.”

It took seven months, counting from the championship parade, or four, if training camp is the marker. Either way, the Lakers have grown frustrated with their inattentive defense. They suffered bad losses in November (Houston, Denver), more in December (Seattle twice, Golden State, Milwaukee), and more again in January (the Clippers, Miami).

If any part of their team game is getting better, it is too subtle to gauge. In the season’s first half, they slogged through a couple of Isaiah Rider moments and the problems between O’Neal and Bryant, and through those humiliating losses, and they appear to be exactly where they were on Halloween night, when they opened their title defense.

Kupchak said he believed his current personnel is capable of winning another championship but admitted to being glad the trading deadline is a month off, leaving him enough time to evaluate and maneuver.

“I’m not going to deny that I’m going to look closer at other teams’ rosters,” Kupchak said. “We’re not going to do anything drastic. We don’t have to. But we’re not playing as well as we could be playing. We’re underachieving. All I can do is stay in the loop and see what’s out there.”

The organization is beginning to allow itself to look forward to guard Derek Fisher’s return. He says his broken foot is a month away from being healed. The team isn’t sure it will be quite that soon, but Fisher’s value as a selfless playmaker and defender has increased.

“There has not been a lot of talk about Derek Fisher not being here,” Kupchak said.

Many had assumed the Lakers, while better with Fisher, had enough to win consistently without him but that hasn’t always happened.

And, on Monday, 39 games in, the Lakers admitted that maybe O’Neal wasn’t in his best shape, which would go a long way toward explaining everything. He has surprised Jackson by asking out of games, though early-season ankle and Achilles’ injuries kept him from practicing all out.

“Shaq is going through a little bit of a thing where he’s trying to lose some weight and trying to recondition himself,” Jackson said. “I think he’s almost taken it to an extreme, where it’s limiting the amount of energy he has, in his process of trying to tighten his weight down so he’s in the best condition. Ultimately he’s doing some things that fatigued him a little bit [Sunday]. Those are some things we have to address too.”

Jackson said he would live with the immediate effect if it meant a more active, more dominant O’Neal down the stretch.

“He just wants to get in really good condition,” he said. “He started doing some extra aerobics. He hadn’t even talked about it, so I may be speaking out of school. But that was what he wanted to do to get himself in the best possible condition. I said, ‘That’s all right.’ The end run is really what you’re after as a basketball club.

“The process right now has hurt him a little bit. We’re willing to live with that for the end result that makes him a better conditioned athlete.”

Bryant did not back off Sunday’s contention that the Lakers fatigue too easily. He said it is an embarrassing problem for an NBA team to have nearly halfway through the season, and indeed it gives the appearance of a lack of commitment.

“Yeah, well, all you do is play basketball, run up and down the basketball court and get paid millions of dollars to do it,” Bryant said. “So I don’t see what the big deal is. We should be in shape.”

Jackson took part of the blame, acknowledging that trying to force minutes out of aging veterans such as Ron Harper and Grant was a mistake. O’Neal, however, said conditioning--his and the team’s--was not an issue.

“I think we’re in good enough shape to beat the teams we’re supposed to beat,” he said. “It’s all about going out there, committing yourself and playing hard. Usually in a game situation, adrenaline takes over anyway.”

So far, being unfit and waiting for the competitive rush to kick in has amounted to a competitive failure.

“Today,” Bryant said, “we all agreed on the fact we just can’t run long enough or have the right energy to get into our offense. When you’re tired, man, it makes cowards out of the toughest of men. You don’t want to execute. You want to sit there on your knees and not execute the fundamentals of the game.

“That’s the problem for us right now. As soon as we solve that, then another problem will pop up and we’ll deal with that. But at least we’ll have the energy to deal with it.”

He smiled at that. They all know there still is time.

That still leaves one issue, the one that simmers most weeks and rages others.

“We’ve got to finally put this Kobe-Shaq business on the back burner,” Grant said. “They’ve got to coexist for this team to have any chance of playing like it did last year.”