Kings Have Been Handed Their Heads

OK, now the Kings say they’re really ready to start playing hard.

The big effort that they promised for Game 2 . . . that they said was definitely coming in Game 3, failed to materialize Friday night, so who cares if they show up Sunday or not?

Their fate is as sealed as sealed gets in one of these series, trailing the mighty, rolling Lakers, 3-0, who proved with this one they truly are something to fear.

If the Kings are vastly improved, as everyone agrees they are after their storybook season, what are the Lakers, who are within a game of sweeping them into their next incarnation?

Before Friday, the Lakers were an impressive team with a lot of momentum, but they hadn’t really been tested in the postseason. Portland looked scary but hadn’t beaten a winning team in weeks and turned out to be an empty suit of armor.

Nevertheless, the Trail Blazers were still capable of making a stand . . . before the league removed Stacey Augmon as well as Dale Davis from their roster for the Laker appearance at the Rose Garden.

But Friday, against a notoriously high-scoring, front-running team, playing before a notoriously loud, Laker-hating crowd, the Lakers ran the Kings off, like children one sends up to bed. Brush your teeth, you can read for 15 minutes and then TURN OFF THAT LIGHT! NOW! THIS TIME I MEAN IT!

“I don’t think we were intimidated,” Coach Rick Adelman said afterward. “I really don’t.

“I think the players played with too much emotion. They were trying to do things that weren’t there.

“I don’t think that was the case . . . but we’re a little deflated now.”

Try running a railroad spike through a child’s balloon and you’ve got your Kings now.

It was a long two days off for them, what with Scot Pollard pronouncing his confidence shaken, and Chris Webber rolling his eyes when he heard that.

With firing up the local crowd the order of the day, the Sacramento press waited for the latest Phil Jackson joke/insult but Jackson disappointed them, failing even to talk after practice Thursday, leaving instead for Colorado and his son’s graduation.

So Sacramento guys were reduced to weak stuff like this exchange between a Fox TV guy and Pollard, the local quote machine:

TV guy: “How much do you love it when a guy like Kobe [Bryant] knocks your confidence level?

Pollard, unimpressed: “I didn’t know he said that.”

TV guy: “He did.”

Pollard: “I don’t really care. I don’t pay attention to what you guys speak or what we even say.”

Then there was the pixieish young woman from a local radio station who told Vlade Divac that they’d been asking their listeners how to stop Shaq. One, she said, suggested “the Tonya Harding method.”

Divac, a puppy dog, not a thug, didn’t even raise an eyebrow.

By Thursday, the second day off, the Kings were at least talking a good game again, with a revived Pollard promising the Kings would be “up and down . . . in their face . . . running around and running by ‘em and playing our loose kind of game that’s going to help us win this series. . . .

“If we play our style of game, we win. They’ll score in the 80s, we’ll score in the hundreds.”

Talk about running around them, by them and what-not.

Friday’s first half was a disaster for the Kings with their big guys, Webber and Peja Stojakovic, doing little, on the rare instances they got the ball from their guards, Jason Williams and Doug Christie, who were either throwing up bricks or throwing the ball to the Lakers.

Midway through the first quarter, the Kings’ starting backcourt was 0 for 5 from the field, with four turnovers, when Adelman sent Bobby Jackson in for Christie.

Of course, when the big guys started getting the ball in the second quarter, they started throwing up the bricks.

Webber missed nine of his first 12 shots and the Lakers went up by as many as 17 points, before O’Neal and Bryant each picked up his third foul and went to the bench. The Kings then finished with an 11-4 run against the Laker role players, which was why they were as close as 46-37 at the half.

As for the run everyone knew the King were going to make . . .

They drew to within 54-48 early in the third period, after which: Divac missed a hook, then missed another hook on a follow shot; Webber threw the ball away; Stojakovic almost threw an open 18-footer over the rim, just grazing the back of the iron; Stojakovic missed a contested 10-footer; Webber missed two free throws, and Jackson missed a 20-footer.

About then, they were probably getting the idea this wasn’t their night, or series.