After One Game, It’s Clear Spurs Have Lost Their Edge

Home-court advantage, it’s fun while it lasts.

The Spurs’ advantage lasted about five minutes before the Lakers took over and started to wipe their own floor with them.

After that, the Alamodome could have been Staples Center, for all the Lakers cared. As if to make them feel at home, the crushed fans began leaving early to beat the traffic and they don’t have anything we’d call traffic around here.

That made it 1-0 in the series, 8-0 in the postseason for the Lakers and 16-0 altogether.

You think the Spurs aren’t worried they picked the wrong team and time to tango?

“It was an important game, in the sense that they’ve been on such a roll, to win this game tonight would really have put some doubt in their minds,” said Spur Coach Gregg Popovich.

“I really believe that. But now they feel even better than they did when they came in, so we’ve got a big job on our hands for Monday night, a very big job.”

They’ve got a miserable week on their hands, is what they’ve really got.

Even if the Spurs manage to win Game 2 Monday, it won’t be until Friday’s Game 3 that they’ll even be able to try to reclaim their home-court advantage. And now that they’re without it, this series doesn’t look the same way it did.

The Lakers didn’t just beat the Spurs. As Popovich said, “They whipped us.”

It wasn’t so unusual that the Lakers ran up a 16-point lead. Stuff like that happens all the time. What was unusual was that they never let the Spurs make a run. Once the lead hit double figures early in the second half, the Spurs never got it back under nine.

It wasn’t a rout, it was worse than that. The Lakers almost toyed with them.

The Spurs’ defense, as it had to, homed in on Shaquille O’Neal.

The Lakers, as is their habit these days, used Shaq to pin the Spurs down and turned Kobe Bryant loose, 45 points worth.

Popovich actually complimented Antonio Daniels on the way he defended Bryant, bemoaning the fact he didn’t get enough help. Of course, once Kobe started rolling, an armored column might not have been enough help.

“Kobe’s playing with the ball, playing with the ball and then shooting the shot really against one defender,” David Robinson said. “And when he’s playing with the ball, you’ve got to get to him. You’ve got to make him want to give the ball up or shoot a tougher shot. . . .

“They score 100 points on us and Kobe scores all those points. That’s just not the type of defense we want to play. . . . What we do best is help one another. We don’t leave each other out to dry.”

Bryant actually missed his first three shots and turned the ball over twice before doing anything right.

Of course, when he then banged in seven shots in a row before the first quarter ended, the Spurs should have known they were in for a long afternoon.

“You just have to continue to play him,” Daniels said. “That’s it.

“I mean, you have to do all you can do, which is stay in front of the guy and get your hands up. If he hits it, he hits it. That’s what our defense is geared towards. It’s keeping guys in front of you and if he elevates over you, he elevates over you.

“Sometimes there’s nothing you can do. It’s kinda like when guys guarded [Michael] Jordan. You know, you can play good defense on the guy, you can cut him off, but when he stops and elevates, with him being 6-7, 6-8, and as athletic as he is, with the ability to elevate, sometimes all you can do is put a hand up and hope he misses.”

Of course, the problem with helping out on Bryant . . . is the Spurs are already helping out on O’Neal.

Let’s see, two guys to watch the big guy, two more for Kobe, doesn’t that leave us spread kind of thin?

“That’s very easy to say--OK, we’re going to take the ball out of Kobe’s hands, we’re going to take the ball out of Shaq’s hands,” Daniels said. “That’s very easy to say and very difficult to do.

“And you have an intangible guy like [Derek] Fisher, who’s extremely important in their whole scheme of things. He does not get much credit but he does a lot of big things for him. He hits a lot of big shots.”

Game 2 is on May 21. The Lakers haven’t lost since April 1. Popovich has a big job on his hands between now and Monday night, a very big job, indeed.