History Test

The Lakers’ opponents in these NBA Finals aren’t the New Jersey Nets.

They’re engaged in a battle with history. And they’re up against

The rafters, attics and shelves of this franchise are so crowded that it’s hard to find room for something new. But if the Lakers beat the Nets and win a third consecutive championship, they could at least gain a spot at the discussion table when it’s time to talk about the great Laker teams of all time.

It wouldn’t be a first for the franchise. The Minneapolis Lakers of the George Mikan era won three straight from 1952-1954.

And even if these Lakers win this, they would still need at least two more championships in the next seven years to establish this as their decade, the way Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls owned the 1990s and the Lakers owned the ‘80s and Bill Russell’s Celtics held sway in the ‘60s.

But Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant could claim a three-peat, something not even the Showtime crew of Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar could manage.

If they do?

“It ranks up there with our great teams,” Johnson said. “The [Larry] Birds, all the guys who had great teams. They’ll be up there with all the rest of them.”

The Lakers are never far from the past. It hangs over their heads on the western wall of Staples Center, in the fabric of those giant championship banners and retired jerseys. It sits on the baseline, next to their bench, in the person of Johnson. Tuesday it was even draped over Bryant’s body in the form of a Jerry West throwback jersey.

The 1971-72 Lakers of West and Wilt Chamberlain set a standard of single-season excellence, with 69 regular-season victories (topped by the Chicago Bulls in 1995-96) and a record 33 consecutive victories that still stands as the longest winning streak in professional sports.

These Lakers made a run at both of those numbers two years ago, back when they still took interest in the regular season. They won 67 games in 1999-2000, 19 in a row.

And no other team put together a 15-1 run like the Lakers had in last year’s playoffs. They also started a string of 12 consecutive road playoff victories, an NBA record that lasted until Sacramento beat them in Game 2 of the Western Conference finals this year.

Perhaps the biggest knock against the Lakers is that there haven’t been enough teams like the Kings to seriously challenge them.

“The question is, are they playing against the same level of competition?” said Quinn Buckner, who beat the Lakers as a member of the Boston Celtics in the 1984 NBA Finals and is providing game commentary for ESPN radio in this series. “The facts are, they can’t change the level of competition they’re playing against.”

Every NBA Finals the Lakers played from 1983 on featured an opponent with at least two future Hall of Fame players at or near their primes.

The 1983 Philadelphia 76er squad that swept the Lakers had Julius Erving and Moses Malone (both enshrined in Springfield), besides Maurice Cheeks. The Celtics from 1984-87 had Bird (Hall class of 1998), Kevin McHale (1999) and Robert Parish, with Bill Walton (class of ‘93) coming off the bench in 1986 and ’87.

The Detroit Pistons, whom the Lakers beat in 1988 to win the only consecutive championships of the Showtime era, had 2000 inductee Isiah Thomas, plus Joe Dumars, who figures to get in.

In 1989, the Pistons denied the Lakers their shot at a three-peat in a series that Laker fans remember for the hamstring injuries that cost them the services of Johnson and Byron Scott.

“I felt that we would have definitely done it,” said Johnson, whose team won every game in the first three playoff rounds that year. “That year we were going for it. We were playing the best ball we had ever played.”

Scott said, “I think, no matter if we had [the three-peat] or not, we still know we probably had the best team in the history of the game.”

These Lakers are still fighting just to be recognized as the best team in the history of the Lakers. Their matchup against the 1980s’ Lakers is a battle of quality vs. quality and quantity.

“Showtime was the real deal,” Buckner said. “You’ve got elite players on both teams, but they had more on that team. You’ve got Magic, Kareem and James Worthy. You’ve got Kobe and Shaq here.

“They had Norm Nixon and [then] get Byron Scott. They were, in my opinion, a much tougher team to play against.”

At various times in the 1980s, the Laker reserves included a former MVP and a future Hall of Famer (Bob McAdoo) and a former No. 1 overall draft pick (Mychal Thompson), not to mention defensive ace Michael Cooper.

New collective bargaining agreements, more restrictive salary cap rules and now the threat of the luxury tax have made it more difficult to amass such talent. And six teams have joined the league since the Showtime Lakers won their last championship in 1988.

“I find it extremely difficult to compare teams of different eras,” said Kurt Rambis, a power forward on the championship teams of 1982, ‘85, ’87 and ’88 and now a Laker assistant coach. “The number of teams that have come into the league since the ‘80s, in some respects has diluted the talent. You have the rule changes that effect things. I think it does both teams in different eras an injustice to try to say that one is better than the other.”

O’Neal boiled the mythical matchup down to one issue: “Who is going to guard me?”

Good question. But surely Abdul-Jabbar, the league’s all-time leading scorer, would manage his share of points. And Johnson, who deserves a spot next to Jordan in the league’s all-time backcourt, would find a way to exert his will on the game, as he always did.

Cooper would have been as good a defensive answer as you could hope to find against Bryant. And the current supporting cast of Rick Fox, Derek Fisher, Robert Horry, Brian Shaw and Samaki Walker would have had a hard time keeping up with the scoring pace of Worthy, Scott, A.C. Green, McAdoo/Thompson and Co., especially if the Lakers had their fastbreak game in full gear. The 1986-87 team had seven players who averaged 10 or more points.

Who could stop whom?

As Johnson said, “They would have done nothing with us, we couldn’t do nothing with them.”

Rambis said, “We didn’t have anybody offensively who could do what Kobe did. We didn’t have anybody that had the physical dominance that Shaq brings. But we may have been better overall, talent-wise, like the comparison [between] Sacramento to us [now]. But you’ve seen that doesn’t matter.”

The Kings have plenty of threats on their roster, but they don’t have as many all-time great players as the 1980s Lakers. And after Mike Bibby, they didn’t have enough players willing and able to do it in crunch time.

That didn’t prevent the Kings from locking the Lakers into a classic series. And like the other memorable series from this current run, Portland two years ago, it came in the Western Conference finals.

“The only difference between us and them, we had to go through people like Detroit, the Celtics in the finals,” Johnson said.

The current Lakers have beaten the 76ers and the Indiana Pacers in the NBA Finals, teams that could boast only two marquee players--Allen Iverson and Reggie Miller--between them.

Same thing with the Nets. It’s Jason Kidd and ... the guys who play with Jason Kidd.

As Bryant said Tuesday, the Nets don’t have a 1-2 punch.

When asked what a third consecutive championship would do for their place in history, though, the Laker stars tried to stay focused on the task at hand.

“I don’t know,” Bryant said. “Hopefully, I’ll let you know when we do it. It’s definitely motivating for me. Right now, I’m not thinking about the past.

“It’s all about this one right here.”

O’Neal said, “I don’t like to think too far ahead. The first team to win four games.”

The problem is, everyone expects the Lakers to get to four first, without much extra time.

That’s the quandary for the Lakers.

For them to show their true greatness, they need to play teams that beat them in the finals.

They need to play a team like the Lakers, the ones who wore the shorter shorts, but at least didn’t have trouble keeping them on.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com.

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Three’s Company

Team that have at least three consecutive NBA championships:

*--* Year Team Comment 1952-1954 Minneapolis Lakers Led by George Mikan, NBA’s first true dynasty 1959-1966 Boston Celtics xxx 1991-1993 Chicago Bulls xxx 1996-1998 Chicago Bulls xxx

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