At Some Point They’ll Do It, Just Like That

You know it’s coming, just not when.

Just sit tight and it’ll happen -- like Kenny’s death in a “South Park” rerun.

At some point in almost every game, the Lakers get down to business and show what separates them from the rest of the NBA. It’s a short burst when their effort combines with the talent and knowledge and then the outcome of the game comes into focus.

Maybe it’s a 25-8 start to the game at Dallas, or a 16-6 run at the outset of the fourth quarter in San Antonio, or a 14-point third quarter for the Indiana Pacers at Staples Center.

It happened at the beginning of the second quarter against the New York Knicks on Tuesday.

Bryon Russell deflected passes. The Lakers threw lob passes for dunks and layups. Shaquille O’Neal bounced free throws in off every portion of the rim and backboard, when he wasn’t throwing down dunks.

By the time the smoke cleared, the Lakers had forced six turnovers and outscored the Knicks, 22-5, and held a 40-30 lead.

As Ludacris would say, just like that. The Lakers were on their way to a 98-90 victory on another one of those nights when you look up at the scoreboard in the fourth quarter and every Laker on the court has 12 to 19 points.

Sometimes it’s over before you realize it’s happening. It’s that elusive zone -- and we’re not talking about the defense. Not even the greatest of the great NBA teams reach it for all 48 minutes in every game. It’s a matter of finding it for long enough, just often enough to distance themselves from the rest.

Phil Jackson took a stab at trying to define it the other day after practice.

“It’s like a chemical formula,” Jackson said. “It’s something that you pull out of your [hat] as a basketball team. You use it wherever the game is in question -- it can be in the last minutes, it can be in the fourth quarter, it can be in the first half -- [for] taking teams out. It’s just kind of a knack that teams have of knowing when to put teams away and how to do it, knowing there’s the crushing moment. And there’s kind of a moment when teams learn that. When they do, and then they can use that as an experience over the course of the season, then it plays into the playoffs. Then they get that feeling of, ‘OK, now we know how to do this.’ It may take a different measure against some teams than others, but you learn the knack of it. That’s what this team is learning right now.”

The 1991-92 Chicago Bulls knew all about it, more than any other team since the Showtime Lakers. That squad, the second of the Bulls’ initial three-peat team, won 67 games in the face of much tougher competition than the 72-win Bulls’ 1995-96 team.

“First of all, we felt as soon as we stepped on the court we were going to win -- just by how many points, we didn’t know,” said Horace Grant, the starting power forward on the 1991-92 Bulls team. “We had that attitude, we had that arrogance about ourselves. It was a point in time during the game, we’d say, ‘OK, enough is enough.’ And we’d turn up the defense -- not the offense, but the defense -- and then next thing we know, the other team’s down by 25 points and the game is over.

“It’s dangerous when you say that you can do it and you don’t do it, but we had the capability, we had the people and we had the bench to say, ‘OK, it’s time to do it’ and boom, we hit ‘em with it.”

Eleven years later, spending more time watching than playing these days, Grant doesn’t quite see the same capabilities in these Lakers.

“Not yet,” Grant said. “Not yet. We’ve got the talent, that’s for sure. But we still haven’t hit that groove yet. We’ve got the confidence, but we’ve got to work a lot harder on the defensive end to be like that Bulls team.”

The Lakers have yet to reach the point where opponents feel so intimidated that the game is over as soon as they walk in the building. When asked recently what it will take to get to that point, Kobe Bryant said: “Consistent ass-kicking.”

The Lakers were building toward that with consecutive blowout victories against Memphis, Washington, San Antonio and Indiana. Then they took a step backward by allowing Utah to erase a 21-point deficit and almost steal a victory Sunday night.

As it stands, they see a certain look in their opponents’ eyes during the course of the night, at the moment when they realize the magnitude of the challenge before them.

“You can sense it when you’re playing a team,” Karl Malone said. “You can tell their demeanor, you can tell their attitude. So you sense it, yeah. You can look at ‘em and kind of tell.”

The Lakers can’t always make their opponents’ eyes go from glassy to rolled back in the sockets. In this game, for instance, they let the Knicks hang around within six to 10 points throughout the fourth quarter. The Lakers are like a cat that toys with its food right now. The finished product should be more like a cobra delivering a lethal strike.

There are many nights when they play just well enough just long enough to get a victory -- but that’s all that matters in the regular season. Amazingly, before the game, Jackson admitted that the players all but had permission to skip the triangle offense until the playoffs.

Tuesday night was win No. 18 -- this one the easy way, with seven minutes of greatness, that necessary single stretch of dominance.

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