Lakers’ Ending Only a Beginning

For all who believed harmony among scoring leaders would bring effortless and seamless achievement in Los Angeles, a Laker win over Sacramento tonight would give them exactly two more victories than last season. Hold the parade.

They also play to secure the No.3 seed in the Western Conference playoffs, where the next game against the Kings would be in the conference finals, Game 1 at clamorous, dangerous Arco Arena.

Regular Season III, Phil Jackson Era, reaches 82 games with the following story lines, none of them Shaq vs. Kobe, which counts for something. That is, everybody needs a friend on the road, where the Lakers could be for much of the coming weeks.

The Lakers prefer to stay at No.3, where they’d play the Portland Trail Blazers in a best-of-five series, Games 1, 2 and, if necessary, 5 at Staples Center, where they’ve won 14 consecutive games. A victory over Sacramento would mean home-court advantage in the second round in any scenario, probably against San Antonio or Dallas, and the same advantage in the conference finals against all but Sacramento.

A loss, and they likely fall to the No. 4 seed, would bring the Minnesota Timberwolves in the first round and, probably, the Kings in the second. If they made it through that, they’d probably go back on the road for Game 1 of the conference finals.

Lacking any of that, these are the Kings, and that’s often good enough, Game 1 or Game 82, the world at stake or nothing. A division champion for the first time since they knocked around Kansas City in Easter Egg blue, the Kings have clinched all they’re going to clinch, which is home-court advantage from now until the end of June, if required. For that reason, King Coach Rick Adelman said he would not play his starters their usual minutes against the Golden State Warriors on Tuesday or the Lakers tonight. That suits the Lakers fine, and the Mavericks and Spurs not so fine, but that would be the cost of losing 24 games.

So, the Lakers stand ready, kind of.

“For us, it’s going to depend on what Sacramento wants to make out of the game,” Jackson said after Tuesday’s practice. “If they’re coming here to play with a full deck, that will put some energy into the game, and we’ll probably know by game time whether it’s important to both of us or to just us.”

Ordinarily, there would not be anything for the Kings to gain here. They’ve already walked their regular-season walk, and a full-effort, burn-the-playbook loss to the Lakers wouldn’t do much for their playoff psyches. Indeed, Adelman might be best off clearing his bench at halftime and taking the beating with a postseason wink.

As he said this week, “We could play on Saturday, which is not too long away.”

Jackson is not so sure it’s that simple, but he would be quite willing to go along.

“If you saw us play an exhibition game against them in Vegas, you saw how desperately they wanted to win that basketball game,” Jackson said. “I know the Maloofs [owners of the Kings] had just opened their gambling casino, and those gaming brothers I’m sure wanted their team to play very well.”

Jackson is not at all concerned about pushing his rotation to big minutes, even though Shaquille O’Neal went for 83 and Kobe Bryant 82 in two days.

“The more I play my guys, probably the better off they’ll be, because they won’t play again until more than likely Sunday,” he said.

So, whatever the Kings want. Bring Chris Webber, Peja Stojakovic and Mike Bibby. Bring Chucky Brown, Mateen Cleaves and Lawrence Funderburke.

“This is the team that set the tempo all year,” Rick Fox said. “I don’t know why they’d want to do anything else but compete.”

Either way, the Lakers can only go along, hope O’Neal gets hale and Bryant rediscovers his jump shot and someone other than Derek Fisher makes a three-pointer and the bench becomes more relevant. It starts this weekend. But first, it starts tonight.

“We’ve played well enough,” Jackson said. “We haven’t played great basketball, but we’ve played well enough. We sit here in a position where we’re not happy we couldn’t make this game [tonight] a very important game for us.... But nothing’s happened that way for us, and we have to deal with what we have to deal with, and that’s the fact we have to play well and improve our game. That’s the goal. I think we’re playing very good basketball right now, maybe the best all year, excepting the [16-1] start.”