Laker Loss Perfectly Acceptable

The Lakers lost for the first time. It wasn’t so terrible for them, really.

By late Friday night, the locker room was predictably quiet, the trainer’s table was predictably busy, and the coach was predictably rational, but even at the end of seven consecutive victories to start their season, imperfection was greeted with something approaching understanding.

“One game,” Shaquille O’Neal said, smirking. “Oooh.”

Regular-season losses have their place, particularly in the big-picture world of Phil Jackson, who fended off O’Neal and team-wide fatigue in the same 24-hour period, and happily headed for home.

The Phoenix Suns, driven by their veteran backcourt, defeated the Lakers, 95-83, at America West Arena, and so these are heady times in the Arizona desert, where the local clubs toppled the New York Yankees and Lakers in the same month.

As for the Lakers, they barely mourned the conclusion of their regular-season winning streak, which went back 15 games, since April 1. Instead, they wondered where their offensive execution went. More accurately, why it hasn’t yet arrived, now nearly three weeks into their three-peat effort.

“I’ll explain this to you,” Laker forward Rick Fox said. “This was an early let’s-see-if-they-can-work-it-out-themselves game by Phil. And we couldn’t work it out.”

The most potent offense in the league trudged through the tail end of a back-to-back ride through Houston and Phoenix with a hail of missed three-pointers and awkward possessions. O’Neal scored 28 points and took 12 rebounds, but he missed 10 of 18 free-throw attempts. Kobe Bryant scored 18 points, but made only five of 15 field goals. The Lakers shot a season-low 40.5%, and had only 14 assists on 30 field goals.

In their second city in two nights, and after arriving at about 2 o’clock Friday morning, many of the Lakers ran on heavy legs by late in the second quarter. By then, too early not to inspire the Suns, the Laker misses were almost always short, and the Suns were sharper in their cuts.

“We’d like to have kept it going,” Bryant said of the season-opening streak that ended four wins from the club record. “Unfortunately it didn’t happen.

“As the season goes on, we’ll get much, much better at executing in these situations. This is where execution is supposed to carry us.”

Instead, it buried them. The Lakers scored 19, 21 and 18 points in the final three quarters, 36 minutes in which they fell further and further behind by missing 37 of 57 attempts.

“We never did fight our way back into the game,” Jackson said. “You have to give the Suns some credit. They were active.”

And, still ...

“We were pretty soft,” he said.

Jackson made the point that his veteran team might actually have lost the game Thursday night, in a five-minute overtime period in Houston. The Lakers defeated the Rockets by a point, but might have spent their verve.

When their scoring died, the Lakers pulled hard at O’Neal and Bryant, the two leading scorers in the NBA, even as the Suns expanded their scoring.

“It wasn’t really them,” Jackson said of Bryant and O’Neal. “It was the fact we didn’t get the rest of the team involved. I thought they were trying to get everybody else involved.”

Stephon Marbury waggled his head from side to side and stuck his right index finger in the air, and that is how he left the floor, moments after rendering the Lakers imperfect.

The Lakers’ last road loss also was here, on March 26, at the end of another seven-game winning streak.

For a night, the Suns were too athletic, too energetic. Too rested. Phoenix hadn’t played since a loss to Orlando on Wednesday, and then it acquired Bo Outlaw on Friday in a three-way trade that sent away Vinny Del Negro and Jud Buechler. Outlaw scored four points in 14 minutes, and mostly gave the Suns a bit more presence in the front court.

Penny Hardaway scored 20 points and Marbury had 18, and Rodney Rogers scored 17 in 25 minutes.

Midway through the fourth quarter, O’Neal was called for elbowing fouls on consecutive possessions, both times when he clipped Jake Tsakalidis on his way to the basket. On the second, Sun Coach Scott Skiles leaped and thrust his fist down court, and the crowd roared, and O’Neal scowled that Tsakalidis would get such calls.

Five minutes later, Tsakalidis fouled out.

“We had an all-around great defensive game,” Rogers said. “We didn’t let Kobe get going. Shaq is Shaq, and we didn’t let their supporting cast, like Rick Fox, Robert Horry, Devean George, get going, and that’s how you’ve got to beat them.”

The Lakers would suggest the Suns had help, from an offense not quite ready, from two early-season games too close together.

“I don’t want to say it was needed,” Bryant said on his way from the locker room, “but it was good for us.”