‘Weak’ Lakers Brushed Aside

The 14 misses, they pulled at the corners of Kobe Bryant’s eyes, and thinned his voice.

He tried a grin, but he had set his jaw too tight, so eventually he just stopped trying, stopped trying to make more of it than it was, just the worst shooting game of his season was all, and so an unlikely loss.

“Pfft,” he said. “Take the good with the bad.”

In their “championship shoes” only two nights before, their coach had said, the Lakers were dismissed as “weak-minded” by the same man Tuesday night, beaten as they were by the Dallas Mavericks, 114-98, at American Airlines Center, before a hysterical sell-out crowd.

The Mavericks defeated the Lakers for the first time in eight games, for the fourth time in 45, in part because Bryant took 18 shots and missed all but four of them, and in part because Steve Nash ripped them for 30 points. The Mavericks, for the moment, lightened their dependence on three-pointers, went harder to the basket, and, defensively, fell over backwards whenever Shaquille O’Neal came around.

O’Neal scored 32 points and took 10 rebounds, but foul trouble took him off the floor for much of the third quarter, when the Lakers were outscored, 33-16, and the Mavericks scored nearly one-third of those points on the fastbreak.

“They ran it down our throats in the third quarter,” O’Neal said.

And so the Laker winning streak ended at five, and their late-season push to the postseason stalled at 12 wins in 14 games, with another difficult game tonight in San Antonio, where the Spurs have been waiting since Saturday. The Lakers fell out of their first-place tie atop the Pacific Division with the Sacramento Kings.

“We’re weak-minded right now,” Laker Coach Phil Jackson said. “We’re weak in mind and in body.”

Only Rick Fox, who scored 16 points, had a steady scoring touch behind O’Neal, and the Lakers were outrebounded, 56-45, and 19-11 on the offensive side.

“You know, they played well,” Bryant said with a look that suggested he didn’t really believe it. “We just gotta take this one in stride.

“Just a loss. Just move on to San Antonio. It’s probably a big win for [the Mavericks], but we didn’t play well and we let the game slip away in the third quarter.”

That would be fair to assume. Their owner, Mark Cuban, high-fived the starters taken from the floor by Coach Don Nelson when the game was in hand. And, this time, it was the Mavericks who pumped their fists and smiled at each other and, finally, believed they could stand with the Lakers.

“We won,” Nash said, “and that’s all that matters.”

Jackson, of course, would not allow it to be that uncomplicated. He drove the Lakers to the very end, with Bryant on the floor chasing Maverick reserves, trying to foul with 18 seconds left and the deficit 17 points. With 17.7 seconds left, Jackson called one last timeout, and Laker players grinned at the show, and the crowd groaned. Indeed, Jackson was able to pull within 16 points of the Mavericks, if that were the goal. It seemed an odd risk with Bryant.

“We had to prepare for some postseason play,” Jackson said, straight-faced. “We’re not going to go down without a scrap ... and just submit.”

Asked if the over-the-top coaching was meant for the Mavericks or the Lakers, Jackson said, “For us.”

No one begrudged him that.

“Hey, that’s our coach,” guard Lindsey Hunter said. “We stand behind him, like, ‘OK, let’s roll.’”

Said Bryant, who had a season-low 12 points: “I don’t know. You have to ask Phil that. Us, as players, our job is to play hard all the way to the buzzer.”

Forty-eight hours after they heaved 40 three-pointers and lost by a layup, the Mavericks went more aggressively to the rim. Often, Nash led them there, by penetration or pass, sprung by screens-and-rolls, around Hunter or Derek Fisher. Raef LaFrentz, the Mavericks’ new center, was accused by Jackson of “flopping,” and the referees were accused by Jackson of buying it. Indeed, O’Neal missed plenty of short shots, and perhaps he was wary of his tenuous spot.

Meantime, Bryant reached the fourth quarter with seven points, having missed all six shots in the third quarter and his last of the first half. And now, in a playoff series, the Lakers might wonder about Bryant and the very physical defense played against him by Adrian Griffin and Greg Buckner. Bryant doubted it, though.

“It was truthfully one of those nights,” he said. “I had a couple shots that rattled around and then came out.

“My rhythm really wasn’t there and some of the credit goes to the defense. The shots were in, but just didn’t fall.”

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