In Close Quarters, They’ve Given No Quarter

It wasn’t advice as much as it was opinion from Chris Webber, an observation more than a warning from a man once sure he had the Lakers beaten. In the difficult minutes after his Sacramento Kings had been eliminated by the Lakers, hours before the New Jersey Nets were to take flight for Los Angeles, a hang-dog Webber frowned and set Byron Scott and the fellas straight.

“The Lakers are the champions and they’re the best team until somebody beats them,” he said. “You have to do it decisively. It can’t be close.”

Close almost always goes to the Lakers. Six of the seven games in the Western Conference finals were decided by seven points or fewer, and the Lakers won four, two in the funhouse that is Arco Arena.

The Lakers are 11 series into their three-peat, which takes 12. The most recent series nearly finished them before it was done, played as it was through food poisoning and early-onset arthritis and crooked shooting, concluding finally with Phil Jackson in their faces, chiding them into defending their basket and their titles.

“What impressed me the most, we were down [three games to two], and we had practice the next day,” Kobe Bryant said. “Nobody was hanging their heads. Nobody. Everybody was excited about the challenge. You would have thought we had the 3-2 lead.”

The final game was as frantic as Jackson had promised, and as sweat-soaking a game as these Lakers had ever played, and they slept Monday, for Wednesday will bring the Nets, next up, fresh and eager and sure their series with the Lakers will be different from the last 11.

Jason Kidd, a versatile point guard and the very reason the Nets are here, called the best-of-seven series “Destiny vs. Dynasty,” and you can easily figure out who’s who, since anything memorable in the Nets’ history was done with a red, white and blue basketball.

Yes, the Nets are sure. Well, pretty sure.

“It’s meant to be, I think,” said New Jersey forward Kenyon Martin, who can be quite normal off the floor.

Characteristically for the Lakers, it will be less about the Nets, champions of a conference of weaklings, than about themselves, assuming Shaquille O’Neal’s arthritis medication stays high and Bryant’s dinner stays down. The fact is, they seem to have their hearts set on a third consecutive championship, accomplished only four times before, and in the last three seasons, they often have gotten what they wanted.

“I think, ultimately, that’s what everybody would want, speaking of the franchise,” Bryant said. “But for us, we can’t think of it on that grand a scale.”

They have found inspiration in every corner, even in their momentary failures.

“Last year, we just kind of swept through the playoffs,” Bryant said. “But to be tested like this, right here, right now, and to respond the way we have, it’s a lot of momentum. We have a lot of confidence in each other.”

The Lakers split two games with the Nets in the regular season, though Bryant was suspended for the first and O’Neal did not play because of injury in the second.

The Nets also were short-handed. The volatile Martin and center Todd MacCulloch did not play in the Lakers’ 101-92 victory in Los Angeles on March 5, when O’Neal made 16 of 21 shots and scored 40 points.

On April 3 in East Rutherford, O’Neal had a sprained right wrist and the Nets won, 94-92. Bryant scored 33 points but missed a point-blank put-back at the buzzer.

The Nets run the Princeton offense, apparently a requirement in New Jersey. Kidd runs it, actually, some say better than any of the Kings do. Scott, the Net coach who was a Laker for 11 seasons, lacks the end-to-end roster talent of the Kings, however, and most expect the Lakers to have an easier time with the Nets.

Still, Jim Cleamons, the Laker assistant who scouted the Nets during the regular season, called them “a very worthy opponent,” and he’s the one married to the VCR. And Jim O’Brien, coach of the vanquished Boston Celtics, predicted a Net championship, though it’s possible that’s Eastern Conference provincialism. His father-in-law, Jack Ramsay, has the Lakers in six.

“They do a wonderful job sharing the ball,” Cleamons said. “They open up the basket behind you. They bring the center up [to the top of the lane]. They’re always cutting to the basket, or coming up off of screens. So, you turn your head, there he goes. They do a wonderful job, man.

“Even more so, they play a team game. We try to play a team game. So, I think it’s going to be good for basketball, in the sense you’re going to have two teams playing five-man concepts, passing, cutting, rebounding. It’s going to come back to skills, which team is the most skillful, can execute the best, and play good, solid defense.”