Portland Stoppers

Robert Horry from the corner, again.

If nothing else, on a Sunday afternoon when they felt the first significant tug of the postseason, when the Portland Trail Blazers worked up the courage to shove back after two years of cowering and infighting, the Lakers had Robert Horry.

From the corner.

Again.

Horry’s three-point shot fell with 2.1 seconds remaining in the Trail Blazers’ season, his open 22-footer eliminating the Trail Blazers in three games and continuing the lopsided recent playoff history between Pacific Division foes.

The Lakers were 92-91 winners at the Rose Garden, where they came back from a five-point deficit in the final 39 seconds, and so will play the winner of the San Antonio-Seattle series, which the Spurs lead, two games to one.

Horry raised his hand and Shaquille O’Neal pounced on his neck and Kobe Bryant gleefully shook his fist in an arena that went silent around them, its basketball team having been swept by the despised Lakers in consecutive first-round series.

The Lakers have won 19 of 20 playoff games, and few--if any--have demanded more of them at the end.

“It looked kind of scary there for a moment,” O’Neal said.

Horry, the role player who buffs up his game for the playoffs, stood at the middle of a frantic finish that could have the Trail Blazers talking to themselves for months.

“It’s cash,” Bryant said. “He’s done it so many times. It is cash.”

Horry shrugged thin shoulders unbecoming of a Western Conference power forward. Ten days before, he was diagnosed with a hematoma--a pooling of blood--beneath his abdominal muscles. There was some fear he would be unable to play. He played 89 minutes in the series. He made two of eight three-point shots over three games, and was one for one when they absolutely needed it to avoid Game 4, at this same arena, on Wednesday.

“The guys on the bench were yelling and then all of a sudden everything slows down for you,” said Horry, who made a similar late three-point shot from the left side in Game 3 of the NBA Finals last season, and who routinely makes such shots. “I shot it and made it.”

He scored eight points, making only one of four three-point shots.

“It’s hard to imagine that you forget a guy in the corner who’s done that time and time again,” Laker guard Derek Fisher said. “What makes Robert so valuable is the fact he doesn’t care about shots like that. Today was just another Robert Horry-type day. You don’t really notice him on the stat sheet, and you don’t really notice him during the game. But at the end of the game, he steps up and bites you.”

The Lakers’ championship three-peat effort pushed onward when Bryant drove the right side of the lane as the clock ran down, the Trail Blazers ahead, 91-89, the Lakers thinking tie, thinking survival. Ruben Patterson blocked Bryant’s path, and Scottie Pippen drifted off Horry, and Bryant flicked a pass to the right, and Horry rose up in front of the Trail Blazers’ bench.

He leaped and shot at the tail end of an unlikely final minute, when Rick Fox made a layup, Bryant made a three-point shot and Pippen made three critical misplays.

In the first 47 minutes leading to their victory, the Lakers played without the verve of the series’ first two games. The Trail Blazers, so lacking in emotional strength in the early part of the series, seemed intent on making one last statement, playing one more game, and perhaps pushing the series back to Los Angeles.

O’Neal scored 21 points, 11 of them from the free-throw line, and took only 11 shots. Bryant scored 25 points, but the Trail Blazers often forced him from the ball. So Fox scored 16 points, and Fisher scored 11, and Horry did what he does.

The Trail Blazers had 53 rebounds, 16 more than the Lakers, and had 17 offensive rebounds and 14 more field-goal attempts. They played to win, and looked the part until Rasheed Wallace missed the first of two free throws with 17.1 seconds left, and Bryant made his three-pointer from the top, and Pippen missed the second of two free throws with 10.8 seconds left, and Horry made his three-pointer.

Portland had one final chance, and Wallace got free on the low block against the 6-foot-1 Fisher, only to have Pippen throw the inbounds pass away.

When it was over, Bryant laughed and Horry laughed with him, and the Lakers hugged, because they had done just enough, and the Trail Blazers had fallen just far enough.

“He’s a critical-time player,” Laker Coach Phil Jackson said. “We have to gauge his moments so that he’s there on the floor at the end of halves and end of games so that he can do that.”

Tough as it was for Jackson to watch at times, when the Trail Blazers appeared to be making the plays down the stretch that would force Game 4, at the end he marveled at what O’Neal, Bryant, Fox, Horry and Fisher were able to do.

“The symbiotic relationship that those five have on the court after playing a couple of championships now showed its difference in there,” he said.

“I was concerned about it because they didn’t demonstrate that with three minutes to go or with two minutes to go. It took the pressure of the game-ending situation to step it up and play the way they should play.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Talk Is Cheap

The Lakers have won the last five playoff series against Portland, though you would never know it by comments the Trail Blazers have made over the years:

2002

Popping Off: Ruben Patterson, a.k.a “Kobe Stopper,” after the Lakers’ 91-79 victory over the Trail Blazers March 29 at Staples Center: “We should have won the game. We can beat the Lakers. I would rather meet them in the first round. They are not that good.”

Talk Is Cheap: The Lakers were good enough to sweep the Trail Blazers in the playoffs for a second consecutive year.

Next year, expect Patterson to proclaim himself as an “Horry Stopper.”

2001

Popping Off: Scottie Pippen, accusing Bryant of exaggerating a rib injury in a 28-point performance in the Lakers’ 106-93 win in Game 1: “He’s trying to be like Mike,” said Pippen, alluding to Michael Jordan leading the Chicago Bulls to a Game 5 victory over the Utah Jazz in the 1997 NBA Finals despite stomach flu. “He wants to have a heroic performance. It didn’t look to me like he had bruised ribs.”

Talk Is Cheap: If Pippen didn’t think Bryant had bruised ribs, then why did he spend more time poking at them than trying to defend him in Game 2? All that Pippen was left with was a bruised ego after Bryant scored 25 in a 106-88 victory.

Popping Off II: Pippen, when asked in a TV interview before Game 3 about the prospect of getting swept, remarked, “I’m not ready for it to be over.”

Talk Is Cheap II: Bryant, upon seeing Pippen’s big head filling up the television in the Laker locker room, shouted at the screen: “You’re ... crazy, man. Today’s your last day of work.” Bryant also responded with an in-your-face 22-point performance in the Lakers’ series-clinching 99-86 victory.

2000

Popping Off: Pippen, after the Trail Blazers battled back from a 3-1 deficit to force a Game 7 in the Western Conference finals: “The Lakers are a fragile team right now.”

Talk Is Cheap: The Trail Blazers proved fragile in the fourth quarter, failing to handle a 15-point lead in an 89-84 loss. Their glass jaw was shattered by Shaquille O’Neal’s bring-down-the-house dunk off a lob from Bryant with less than a minute left. Pippen’s reaction to the biggest collapse in NBA Game 7 history: “I realize that we sort of made cowards of ourselves in the fourth quarter.”

Jim Rhode