Lakers Have Proved That They Know How to Take It to the Next Level

Back up. Go retro. Look over your shoulder.

The Lakers believe they’ll move forward because of where they’ve been in the past. They’ve gone through all the necessary stages of suffering and they’ve triumphed after the hardest tests.

It took more than nine minutes into his discourse on all aspects of the Western Conference finals, but Rick Fox got to the essence of why his Lakers think they will beat the Sacramento Kings.

“This series, we play off of our experience,” Fox said. “We play off of the fact that we’ve had success in [Arco] Arena.”

Normally you put the Lakers up against any team and the difference comes down to the fact that the Lakers have Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant and the other team doesn’t. That’s what happened with the San Antonio Spurs. At times Tim Duncan was as good as either Laker superstar, but he couldn’t down them both.

The Kings can’t match megastars, but they throw a bigger, deeper package at the Lakers. Start with three guys who need minimal identification: CWebb, Vlade and Peja. They also can hit you with Bobby Jackson, Mike Bibby, Hedo Turkoglu and Doug Christie. Add the whole crew up and they put more points on the board than any other team in the league this season.

They have home-court advantage. They have all kinds of incentive, and the directive from their cowbell-clanging fans to “Beat L.A.”

But--with the exception of Vlade Divac, who went to the NBA Finals his rookie year with the Lakers in 1991--they just don’t have the experience of playing in the conference finals.

“There’s a big difference between a conference semifinal and a conference final,” Derek Fisher said. “We feel like we understand that.”

The hardest knocks come from the conference playoffs, where everybody knows each other so well. You have to beat everybody on your block before you can start challenging people from different neighborhoods.

That’s the Law of the West now. It used to be that way in the East, when the Celtics, then the Pistons, then the Bulls, stood in front of the gate, taking a toll on anyone who tried to pass through to the NBA Finals. Anyone aspiring to glory first had to line up and take their lumps. Pat Riley called it the Principle of Painful Progression.

Shaq went through it in both sides. He went home after getting swept in five of his first six playoff appearances with the Orlando Magic, then the Lakers.

The core group of Lakers in the Shaq and Kobe era went through it. They lost in the conference semifinals to Utah in their first go-round, the 1997 playoffs.

They beat the Seattle SuperSonics in the second round the next year, everyone proclaimed them the next thing, called Shaq the next Wilt Chamberlain and prepared for L.A.’s return to the Finals.

Then they got swept by the Utah Jazz in the conference finals.

“We felt like we’d really done something,” Fisher said. “We got to Utah, and they put us right back in our place.

“When you don’t understand where you are, sometimes it’s hard to go out and relax and play. We feel like we understand where we are and what it takes to keep your composure and stay poised in situations like these. Hopefully our experience will give us the edge down the stretch in these games.”

The Kings can’t rely on that. And they’d better not get too comfortable with their home-court advantage. For all of the talk of the decibel levels at Arco Arena and how much better it makes the Kings, this group is only 7-6 at home in the playoffs the past four years.

Now they’re up against a team that has won 11 consecutive road playoff games.

Even though the series begins in Arco on Saturday, it will be the Kings who are on unfamiliar ground. It sure showed the way they celebrated their series-clinching victory over the Dallas Mavericks, when Bobby Jackson donned some sort of divisional championship hat (they make those?) and owners Joe and Gavin Maloof danced away.

“This is new for a lot of them,” said Fox, who caught their celebratory act on television. “I saw a team that was in the moment of winning the second round and going to their first Western Conference finals. I can recall the first time we did it, it was a big moment for us, exciting, move on. But in every case--and they’ll understand this as we move on here--each step brings a different level of basketball. It’s a level that’s incomprehensible until you’re there, until you experience it. That’s what’s going to be the true telling sign of this series.”

I think that’s what it comes down to. You can’t say that the Kings won’t win because Webber, their best player, isn’t a classic go-to guy. I say it doesn’t matter because they have so many other guys who can make big shots.

You can’t say they’re too erratic, not after Bibby replaced Jason Williams.

Scoring is certainly proving to be a more difficult task for the Lakers than the Kings, especially with O’Neal hurting from finger to toe and no longer the automatic option he once was.

Quite simply, the Lakers know the drill.

What we saw when the Bulls three-peated was their collective knowledge carrying them. They always staggered to the finish line, their third championships getting scratched out by their final reserves of willpower.

The Lakers have been to the top twice in the last two years. Don’t think they suddenly forget how to get there.

Lakers in six.

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