O’Neal Is Ready for His Close-Up

Shaquille O’Neal generally does what he wants, which is why there will be few of his observations in today’s newspaper, as he slipped out the back of Staples Center sometime between beating the New York Knicks and being forced to talk about it.

He scored 40 points, stopped to tell NBC’s Jim Gray that he’s “focusing on another three” rings before Phil Jackson’s contract expires and that he won’t worry about his teammates “when playoff time comes,” and then took the first thing smoking back to his Beverly Hills lair.

The Lakers won, 117-103, Sunday afternoon, primarily because the Knicks could not jump shoot with O’Neal’s layups, dunks and hooks, at least not for an entire 48 minutes. O’Neal made 15 of 21 field-goal attempts, only one from beyond six feet. It was his fifth consecutive game of exactly 21 attempts. He has scored 40 points in two of three games, the first coming Tuesday against the New Jersey Nets, proving again that he kills teams that play within aroma distance of the Hudson River.

As a result, the Lakers have won eight of 10 games, and remain one loss behind the Sacramento Kings, leaders of the Pacific Division and Western Conference.

“I’m very optimistic about the way he has been playing the past couple weeks,” Jackson said. “He is showing his most-valuable-player status in this league.”

It is a familiar trend, one O’Neal followed last season, when he plodded through so much of the regular season because of a sore foot, pounded through the last of it, and then watched the league’s MVP award fall to Allen Iverson. A year later, he has an achy big toe and an attitude, and appears to be resigned to grinding through both.

Asked if he believed O’Neal were feeling better or simply ignoring a malady some assume will require postseason surgery, Laker guard Derek Fisher said, “I think he’s fighting it more, taking himself through what he has to take himself through.”

It was enough to discourage the Knicks, one of those ever-dangerous last-place teams at Staples, if only barely. The Lakers outscored the Knicks by 32 points in the paint, enough to overcome the Knick shooters, who made 63.6% of their attempts in the first quarter and 53.3% in the second.

In the second half, Jackson took O’Neal off the active and perimeter-minded Kurt Thomas, who scored 16 points in the first half, and put Robert Horry on him. Thomas fouled out with 2:02 left in the game, and to the bench he took four second-half points.

Horry started again for Samaki Walker, who is on the injured list with a bum elbow, and brought the typically eclectic line: eight points, 13 rebounds, four steals, three blocks and two devastating fourth-quarter three-pointers.

“It’s just being in the right place at the right time,” said Horry, who was kneed hard in the left thigh by Thomas in the final quarter but played on. “That’s how it is. Some games it’ll be like that.”

Devean George scored 17 points, which matched his career high.

The Lakers kept the Knicks to 43 second-half points, and they led by at least eight through the fourth quarter, and so lived through a spirited game by Latrell Sprewell, who scored 31 points, most over and around Kobe Bryant. Bryant, who has a sore left thumb, took 14 shots, made seven, and had 18 points and seven assists.

“It bothers me a little when I pick up a basketball,” he said.

Other than that ...

One of the league’s moribund franchises, the Knicks scored 12 points more than their season average and still lost for the 13th time when they’ve held a double-digit lead. Eleven of the come-from-way-ahead defeats have come in the Don Chaney era, now 42 games, 29 losses and one contract extension old.

The former Laker assistant had no answer for O’Neal, a conundrum that places him squarely with 27 other NBA coaches. He tried Thomas and Felton Spencer, but the Knicks were slow to double-team and O’Neal did what he does, as he likes to say, when he stays around long enough to say it. He has averaged 31.7 points in the last 11 games, leading the Lakers in scoring in the last nine.

“It’s impossible,” Chaney said. “A couple times we even tried to foul him and he went up and scored. He’s just so massive in there, you can’t front him because they’ll throw it over the top, and if you play behind him you can’t stop him.... You’re at his mercy.”

That, of course, is the point. And when O’Neal has that sense about him, when his hand is high and his eyes beg for the basketball, the Lakers flood the joint with entry passes and stand back.

“When he’s doing that, you look for him to score every time and maybe sneak in for offensive boards in case he misses,” Horry said.

O’Neal has made 70 percent of his field-goal attempts in the past five games, and he’s shown life and agility that wasn’t there earlier, when the playoffs were so far away he could barely see them.

“He’s been more verbal lately, as far as making sure guys are ready to play,” Fisher said. “He knows how to get through a regular season. He knows his body. The rest of us don’t.

“We have to know that’s part of his personality. He knows the games mean a lot more.”