Lakers Can Play Harp Over Kings

By TIM BROWN

May 13, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

SACRAMENTO —

Ron Harper dismissed the Sacramento Kings on Saturday afternoon.

It was not the most perilous of forecasts. It was offered calmly, from the perspective of a courtside chair at Arco Arena, where today the Lakers will play for a four-game sweep.

It did, however, speak to a fresh confidence on a team that six weeks ago could not have predicted even an honest effort. The Lakers, Harper said, once fractured and routinely unpredictable, are not only prepared to advance to the Western Conference finals, they believe they’re due it.

“It’s over,” Harper said. “We ain’t going to lose four. So, it’s over. And the sooner, the better.”

If it seemed strange coming from Harper, who has played five minutes in the postseason and after Saturday’s practice wore plastic bags filled with ice on his rickety knees, it shouldn’t have. He is the Laker co-captain, the possessor of four championship rings, and one who often serves as the keeper of the locker-room conscience.

Though NBA mores forbid the public mention of imminent elimination, laughable in a league practically built on the tenet that winners gloat for TV and losers take it, the 37-year-old Harper has little patience for sentiment. It is time for the Lakers to move on, he said.

“They can’t handle us,” he said. “They said they wanted to play us. They said that after they beat Phoenix. We’re here. It doesn’t look pretty, but we’re heeeere.”

The Lakers know it, but most of them forced back the smiles and the visions of springtime in San Antonio. The Kings know it, but summoned tight little grins and we’re-not-dead-yet musings.

“We have to get the win,” Chris Webber said. “If we don’t, we gotta go home.”

No team has come back from a 3-0 deficit in the NBA playoffs, a statistic that set the mood for Saturday’s practices, the Lakers in the big arena in the field and the Kings in the brick practice facility across the parking lot.

“We are in deep trouble,” King center Vlade Divac admitted.

In the most critical game of their season, on the floor where they lost only eight games, before their hysterical fans, the Kings lost by 22 points Friday night.

“They were a soft team and now they look like the old Chicago Bulls out there,” King guard Bobby Jackson said. “They’re just in a nice groove where everybody’s clicking. It’s a hard team to beat.”

Shaquille O’Neal is averaging 36 points and Kobe Bryant is averaging 30.7. O’Neal is making 60.6% of his shots and Peja Stojakovic is making 34.7%. “Stojakovic,” as it turned out, is Serbian for “Owned by Fox.”

And so Harper, unbound by superstition, made his observation, from the heart, without hesitation.

“He said that?” King center Scot Pollard said. “Well, who the hell cares what he thinks?”

Pollard, for one, judging by the expression of annoyance.

“He doesn’t even play,” Bobby Jackson said of Harper. “Why is he talking? If he was playing, it’d be a different story. . . . Course, they came in and beat us, so why shouldn’t they feel that way? If we were up 3-0 that’s how we’d feel.”

The last prediction came from Bryant, who gave notice to the Portland Trail Blazers in the hours before they were swept from the first round. On the road then as well, the Lakers won with relative ease, sending the Trail Blazers to a full, arduous summer of roster reassessment. The same clock ticks on the Kings, whose best player, Webber, is due for free agency.

The Lakers’ memories of last year’s failures in games that would have closed out series haunt them still, however. They wasted six of them on the way to the title, among them a 117-98 Mother’s Day loss to Phoenix after they held a 3-0 lead in the second round.

“We embarrassed ourselves and our mothers,” Rick Fox said Saturday.

Though the Lakers have won 14 consecutive games and are playing their best basketball in a year, Coach Phil Jackson would be aghast at Harper’s impudence. It was Jackson, after all, who sought momentum all season, rooted publicly for it, and then recently downplayed the winning streak that resulted in a Pacific Division championship and home-court advantage in this series.

“We’ve won three in a row against the Kings,” Jackson said. “That’s all that’s important to us right now. The key about this, we’ve been in this position before, in Phoenix last year, in this particular round. We know how much you still have to come back to play that Mother’s Day Sunday game that can be a mother.

“We know we didn’t do a very good job of it last year. We remember the fact that we got blown out in Phoenix in Game 4. But, you can’t take anything away from what the Kings are going to do. It depends on how they play. If they play as well as they can, we’re going to have a difficult time at any level winning on their court.”

TODAY’S GAME

LAKERS at SACRAMENTO

2:30 P.M., CHANNEL 4

LAKERS LEAD SERIES, 3-0

J.A. ADANDE

The Lakers have several players who have been willing to go from limelight to background. D9

LAKER NOTES

Kobe Bryant flies to Los Angeles to attend to a family matter, but he is expected to play today. D9

KING NOTES

Even facing a 3-0 deficit, Sacramento players won’t concede that they’re facing a superior foe. D9

SERIES REPORT: D9

Agence France-Presse