Smiles High as 10-1 Lakers Stifle Nuggets

The transition period from repeat to three-peat, from Grant to Walker, from suspicious Shaq to generous Shaq, from soul patch to bare patch, reached 10 wins in 11 games Wednesday night.

“You seen our schedule?” Robert Horry asked after the Lakers defeated the Denver Nuggets, 89-68, at the Pepsi Center.

The retort: “You seen the NBA?”

What the league lacks in ferocity it makes up for in jump shooters and skinny centers--that was Raef LaFrentz and Ryan Bowen clinging to Shaquille O’Neal’s elbows--so there doesn’t appear to be much out there to scare the Lakers.

Here, in the perfect ambush--back-to-back games, travel until 3 a.m., altitude flicking at their lungs, a historically tough place for them to win--the Lakers merely held the Nuggets to 32.6% shooting. The Nuggets’ 68 points were the lowest by either team in the history of the series, 110 games old.

And O’Neal scored only 10 points. Bracketed by what appeared to be dozens of elfin Nuggets, O’Neal had six assists and seven rebounds and left the scoring to Kobe Bryant, who had 24 points, and Mitch Richmond, who had 13 in 20 minutes, and Lindsey Hunter, who had nine. The Laker bench scored 36 points, some of them with the outcome still in question.

“We should be 10-1,” Horry said. “We should be 11-0. We’ve been playing decent enough ball. We haven’t played four quarters together. We do that all the time. We do ill-advised stuff.”

Bryant, whose game for the most part has been cool and businesslike, had a season-high 13 rebounds and seven assists. Weak on rebounding for much of the past three weeks, the Lakers outrebounded the Nuggets, 59-36. They also had 27 assists on 35 field goals. So, for a moment, Rick Fox was somewhat satisfied with the offense.

Still, when Phil Jackson stood in the middle of the locker room and asked what they liked about the game, someone yelled, “We ran the offense.” And Jackson, who knows it when he sees it, responded, “You think you ran the offense?”

Even so, this, unanimously, counted as a good win, considering what could have gone wrong.

The Lakers reached Thanksgiving at 10-1, with something less than their best game, with their incumbent point guard on the injured list, with a few guys running the offense and the rest trying to stay out of their way.

“We’re winning,” O’Neal said. “We just know how to win.”

And when they struggle?

“That’s because two of our guys [newcomers Hunter and Samaki Walker] are not familiar with the terminology, of where to go,” O’Neal said. “I think they’re being too careful to not get in the way.”

No worries, though, O’Neal said. After all, it took him 20 or 30 games, he said, “to master it.”

That long?

“It just didn’t look like it,” he said, “because I’m a hell of a player.”

The Nuggets didn’t hold the Lakers’ attention long. Predictably, Nick Van Exel rallied them from a 22-point, second-quarter deficit. He scored seven points in the third quarter, which the Nuggets won, 20-17, and finished with 21 points. He needed 22 shots for those points, however.

“They looked like the team that played last night, not us,” Jackson said. “It looked like two teams that dragged around on the court. There was not much life.”

The set jaws of the first half gave way to that glazed-over look the Lakers sometimes get, when the other team is missing its best player (Antonio McDyess, in this case), and the lead is large and the building is quiet and the jet is idling.

On Thanksgiving eve, the Lakers gave thanks to Denver’s perimeter shooters, who brought the Nuggets to within six points late in the third quarter, but went totally to pieces after that.

Denver missed 17 of 23 fourth-quarter shots, and the lead quickly was 24 again.

The Nuggets were one for six from the three-point arc in the first half. In 21/2 games, the Sacramento Kings, Clippers and Nuggets were a combined three for 40 on three-pointers.

No one runs at the perimeter screaming “Hey” like the Lakers.

Done with the Nuggets, the Lakers are off today, and return Friday to play Golden State, a team Horry called “a true test,” at 6-6.

“We’re playing well enough to win ballgames,” Bryant said. “It’s encouraging to win and to still be improving as we’re doing it.”