Lakers Taking the Wrong Rout

These aren’t normal days in Lakerland when the only thing you can count on is Shaquille O’Neal making his free throws.

The Big Guy is money. Just put the points on the board as soon as he steps to the line. In the past six games he has shot 71% on his free throws--hitting 75% or better in five of them.

Remember when his free-throw shooting was the Lakers’ one uncertainty? In the wake of a dispirited 108-84 loss to Sacramento Wednesday, this team has more question marks than the Riddler’s costume.

Can they stop anyone on defense? Can they recapture the intensity and desire that carried them to the championship last year? Can they all just get along?

The “Triangle” has taken on a whole new meaning for the Lakers. The team tension has split into a three-sided polygon of Shaq vs. Kobe Bryant, Phil Jackson vs. Kobe and Shaq vs. Phil.

Shaq’s mad at Kobe for shooting too much, and he is miffed that Jackson has not stopped it. The only thing Jackson has done about it is rip Kobe to the media, the most damning being a quote in the Chicago Sun-Times in which Jackson said Bryant would “sabotage his own games” in high school “so the game would be close. So he could dominate at the end.”

Instead of solving the problem Jackson created another one by alienating Bryant, which will probably cause him to be more isolated from the rest of the team than he was before.

Right now Jackson doesn’t have either superstar in his corner. Normally that spells doom for a coach, but Jackson’s status as the multi-ringed Zen Master means he’s secure. That $6-million-a-year contract doesn’t hurt, either.

Jackson led them to the promised land last year, but no one is taking this team in any one direction--at least not upward--right now.

Jackson said he wished he had not used the word “sabotage.” He said the word “took on a large degree of colorization.” But he didn’t entirely rescind the quote or the sentiment behind it.

Bryant, the youngest of the three, has been the most mature about saying the right things to the media. He surely learned his lesson from December, when he finally said some things about O’Neal and the whole thing skyrocketed like an energy bill. He has publicly brushed Jackson’s comments aside.

Meanwhile, the Lakers had won six of their first eight games without Bryant.

Hopefully Bryant, who sat out his fourth consecutive game because of an ankle injury, noticed how smoothly the offense ran in the first quarter Wednesday night, when the Lakers went inside to O’Neal, the team got good looks at the basket every time downcourt and he scored 17 of the Lakers’ 30 points.

But the game also showed how weak the Lakers are without Bryant’s perimeter defense, and he hasn’t played up to his first-team all-defense standards of a year ago because of his problematic ankles. Wednesday, the Kings ran wherever they wanted, shot whenever they wanted.

It was a defensive disaster all-around for the Lakers. One game after allowing the Suns to score 104 points, they let the Kings reach the century mark with 6:22 left in the fourth quarter.

This also makes it two consecutive games in which the Lakers had a chance to extinguish the hopes of a potential playoff opponent and instead allowed the pilot light to stay on.

After losing their first three meetings, the Kings had to be questioning whether they could beat the Lakers. Now they probably can’t wait to get another shot at them.

Jackson said the regular-season series does carry into the playoffs.

“Psychologically it means a lot to a team,” Jackson said. “It doesn’t mean that you’re going to win the series, obviously. It does mean that there’s some kind of a matchup or situation going on.”

More than the mind games, the head-to-head meetings are the first tiebreaker used to determine playoff seedings and home-court advantage. The Lakers have clinched the series with Sacramento and Dallas, teams they could finish tied with in the Western Conference standings. With the Lakers trailing Sacramento by three games in the loss column, however, the Dallas scenario seems more likely.

In one night the Lakers went from challenging the Kings for the Pacific Division crown to fighting off the Mavericks for home-court advantage in the first round. It wasn’t that sudden, the problems that have been brewing all season are beginning to catch up to them.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at his e-mail address: j.a.adande@latimes.com.