Depth May Beat Lakers’ Stars

Coming up next on the NBA triple feature: Your neck, whipsawing over to a third vision entirely.

Because the Lakers, they ain’t like those other guys.

The great thing about the challenge of Los Angeles is that the Lakers are the greatest-hits collection of the lesser playoff teams. That isn’t merely what made them two-time NBA champions; it’s what defines them as a franchise.

Like the Utah Jazz, the Lakers rely heavily on two players and a supporting cast.

Unlike Utah, the Lakers’ two players are Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, and the supporting cast includes people such as Robert Horry, Derek Fisher and Rick Fox.

Like the Dallas Mavericks, the Lakers aren’t afraid to get out and run with the ball.

Unlike Dallas, the words “out of control” almost never appear in the article about that part of the game in the next morning’s paper.

The Lakers are the better half of most everybody. Nobody stops Shaq; very few people stop Kobe. The L.A. situation is unparalleled in the NBA: A team whose two best players are arguably the first two most people would pluck out of the talent pool.

And yet this is the year the Sacramento Kings may have enough to counter--not counter Bryant and O’Neal specifically, but counter L.A. in whole, fighting position-control with balance and depth. O’Neal is banged up; Peja Stojakovic is barely walking. But if this becomes a war of attrition, the Kings suddenly jump up on the odds board.

It isn’t going to be about the Kings’ momentum in the Western Conference finals, and that’s actually the blessing. Momentum comes and goes.

It’s totally unreliable, is the thing. The Lakers long ago dismissed momentum as a useful concept, opting instead for consistent effort. They let their opponents worry about who had the big Mo. If they won a game ugly, they simply accepted the result and went forward.

This was the season when the Kings appeared to embrace the same idea. Oh, they had their winning streaks and their long rolls, but look closer: This is a team that went 15-5 to open the season without the injured Chris Webber. It’s a team that went 6-0 on a crucial late-season road trip--virtually ensuring themselves of the home-court advantage they have in this L.A. series--primarily without the injured Stojakovic.

Stojakovic went down in Game 3 against Dallas, and that was a win, and so were the next two games that wrapped up the second round for Sacramento. There was nothing about any of it that suggested the Kings were winning on momentum; they were winning on desire and depth and talent and heart.

They went from halting walk to dead sprint when they went from Utah to Dallas and won both ways; and now they’re going in to play a scene with a Lakers’ team that knows quite a bit about any style you’d care to throw down. There’s no momentum here on the cusp of the conference finals. What it’s really about, thank heavens, is basketball.