Shaq Can’t Beat Dulls

Shaquille O’Neal, after a 17-point loss to one of the NBA’s worst teams on Tuesday night, pulled on his cashmere outfit, sat down at his locker and admitted he hadn’t had it in him.

His fault.

No laughs, no jokes.

His bad. That was that. He shrugged, best he could. The man doesn’t shrug much.

At the start of 21 games that will decide their playoff seeding at best and their very playoff lives at worst, the Lakers were blindsided by the Chicago Bulls, 116-99, at United Center. At the start of a four-game trip they insisted could be had with defense and O’Neal, the Lakers had the legs and hearts for neither.

“I’m going to take the blame for that game,” O’Neal said. “Slow night. Missed a lot of shots. Really couldn’t get into it.”

Didn’t much interest him. Imagine that.

“He was very lethargic, I think,” Coach Phil Jackson said. “I don’t know what the deal was. I think a lot of it has to do with scoring. If he doesn’t score, he didn’t get into the game like I’d like to see him.”

In what was an oddly upbeat postgame outside of the O’Neal confessions, Jackson said he’d write off the loss to jet lag, Kobe Bryant was actually asked if he felt the ghost of Michael Jordan in the hazy arena, and Robert Horry said he’d be appalled at the loss, “if I could spell appalled.”

Bryant admitted he’d felt Jordan “lick the back of my head.”

O’Neal took 11 shots in 37 minutes, missed all but three of them and scored a season-low 13 points. The Bulls shot 55% from the floor, 80% (12 for 15) on three-pointers, and nobody much bothered to defend Jamal Crawford, who scored 24 points, or Jalen Rose, who scored 27. That was that.

And so the Lakers fell back into seventh place in the Western Conference, behind the Utah Jazz and now well behind the Minnesota Timberwolves. They might pass a kidney stone on this trip but not the Timberwolves, who hold the fifth seeding, five games ahead.

Bryant scored 36 points and Rick Fox, whose designated defender, Donyell Marshall, spent more time in O’Neal’s lap than Fox’s face, scored 23. Fox was six for 13 from the arc. The Bulls double-teamed O’Neal away from the ball, often with second-year men Eddy Curry and Tyson Chandler, and then tripled him with it. The end result: O’Neal took two shots in the second half, none in the fourth quarter, when a handful of Laker reserves actually made Bull Coach Bill Cartwright call a couple of timeouts.

Ten days ago, O’Neal was unhappy when he was afforded 13 shots in Seattle. There was none of that sentiment here. O’Neal credited Chicago’s defense and had little other explanation.

O’Neal had pointed out that he was a critical element in the offense, no Bill Cartwright, he said. So, Cartwright, years removed from what O’Neal would call his token big-man status for three championships in Chicago, sent his young men at O’Neal.

“They’ve got two really big, active guys,” he said. “It was really hard for me to get my shot. Then we just relied on the jumper and I never really got into the game.

“They played a lot harder than we did.”

Asked how this could have happened, O’Neal looked up from under the brim of a floppy cashmere hat and said, “Just, you know, slow night. Three for 11. Just slow. I was a step slow.”

O’Neal spent the final minute on the bench, a white towel draped over his shoulders. Jackson cleared his bench, and the fans stood and cheered the team that tried the hardest.

“It’s a frustrating game for him when he doesn’t touch the ball,” Fox said. “When you get three guys standing around him, then people wonder why we don’t throw him the ball. We’re not going to throw the ball into traffic.

“[But] we play one ounce of defense tonight and it doesn’t matter he doesn’t touch the ball.”

Said Bryant: “It sets us back. Our confidence is shaken. We don’t think we can go to Detroit and win. I don’t know what to say.”

He grinned.

“We’ll see what happens,” he said.

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West Race

The race for eight playoff positions in the Western Conference. The Lakers dropped from sixth to seventh as a result of their loss to Chicago:

*--* Team W-L GB 1. Dallas 48-15 -- 2. Sacramento 45-19 3.5 3. San Antonio 44-18 3.5 4. Portland 41-22 7 5. Minnesota 42-24 7.5 6. Utah 36-27 12 7. Lakers 35-27 12.5 8. Phoenix 33-30 15 9. Houston 32-30 15.5 10. Golden State 31-33 17.5 11. Seattle 28-34 19.5

*--*