Hype Is Off for Lakers, Kings

The Lakers went off to Sacramento on Wednesday afternoon, distracted by world events and happy to have their game, the complications of their basketball season less complicating for the moment.

They’ll play the Kings tonight at Arco Arena, both teams as close to full strength as they’ve been since June, and so the truest regular-season measurement yet of last year’s Western Conference finalists. Still, Phil Jackson said any important announcement by President Bush would be carried live in the arena, and that he had advised his players of the possibility that the next whistle could bring news, and so a big game became smallish again.

On an unusual day in El Segundo, the questions put to players and coaches caromed from what loomed in the Middle East to what followed in the Western Conference, an ungainly juxtaposition of life and play blurted from behind notebooks and microphones.

Kobe Bryant raised his eyebrows and said, “Everybody has their role to play in this war. Mine is to entertain for two hours,” and that seemed to carry their sentiments. Shaquille O’Neal offered to buy every returning soldier a beer. No Laker failed to mention what might lie ahead, sometimes momentarily composing himself when jerked back to discuss the significance of a basketball game.

A third game between the teams -- they split the first two, each winning on the other’s home court -- only means the playoffs are near, and that the Lakers will know soon enough about their chances for a fourth championship in a row.

“I think we’re in a position now where we’re really thinking about the end of the season,” Jackson said, when once it seemed far away.

As O’Neal has played himself toward his familiar game after off-season surgery and as Bryant has had his knees swell and recover, so too have the Kings pushed through injury. The difference in mid-March: The Kings lead the Pacific Division and the Lakers have fallen to sixth in the conference.

For the first time against the Lakers, and for one of the few times all season, most of the Kings are sound. Chris Webber, Peja Stojakovic, Mike Bibby, Bobby Jackson and Scot Pollard have missed blocks of games, so the Kings haven’t had the success they’d expected after taking the Lakers to seven games in the last conference finals. Bibby during the preseason said he believed the Kings could win 70 games, then he broke his foot, and a stream of injuries to his fellow Kings followed, and now they probably won’t match their 61 wins of last season. And now the Lakers are coming.

“I don’t know if you can ever be prepared for Shaq,” King Coach Rick Adelman said. “But we’ve got healthy bodies, and that’s a start.”

The Lakers were without O’Neal for 12 games, and then he struggled for months. They lost 19 of their first 30 games, and at their worst appeared to be in danger of missing the playoffs. They are 27-9 since, O’Neal seems healthy, and no one is talking about a Laker-less postseason anymore.

Said Derek Fisher: “We’re playing fairly good basketball. Not our best. But well enough to win in a lot of situations.” What’s left, he added, was, “No more nights like Chicago or Detroit, when it looks like we’re just not there.... I think that’s coming, though.”

Of course, O’Neal can make it difficult on everyone too.

You knew, eventually, somebody would get his feelings hurt, and O’Neal would strike this posture of utter surprise, as though he couldn’t imagine calling other grown men “Queens” and “Cub Scouts” would cause such problems.

The Kings have had to take it, of course, because they continue to lose the big games to the Lakers, the ones in May and June that mean playoff advancement. The way it has worked is the Lakers roll insults up the Golden State Freeway, wait for the morning paper for the reaction, and just before it gets totally out of hand O’Neal proclaims he simply has been hyping the game, series, season, whatever, like the good NBA employee he is.

Recently it was Bibby who drifted onto O’Neal’s radar, the King point guard having suffered the misfortune of being selected for the 2004 Olympic team, apparently over Allen Iverson. O’Neal contended that Bibby only appears to be a good player because of the better players around him, heretofore known by O’Neal as “Queens,” thus allowing Bibby to accomplish “Boy Scout-ish” things.

Bibby retaliated by calling O’Neal the “hype man,” and two Kings on the injured list said they didn’t think O’Neal was being very nice, so if the Kings are angry they’re keeping it to themselves. Or they agree with O’Neal.

“That’s just talk from a guy who likes to talk,” Bobby Jackson said. “Nobody cares. You can’t listen to everything he says. Even he don’t listen to everything he says. Shaq is looking to get the rivalry started already, before the playoffs even start.”

So, on they go, Kings versus Lakers, bigger than ever, and insignificant, today.

“Nothing in the grand scheme of things,” Rick Fox said on the way from the gym, “compared to the men and women out there risking their lives.”