The Door May Be Slammed

Kobe Bryant saw a replay of the dunk on television.

Nobody does seen-it-all-before like Bryant. But this wasn’t some soft dunk, some breakaway two-hander that every kid at Rucker Park can do at 15, and the smile tugged at the corners of his mouth until he had to let it go.

“Wow,” he said.

The Minnesota Timberwolves have never played a Game 6. They have never won a playoff series. They lose these games, so far.

The Lakers, with a victory tonight, in the kind of game they’ve played a handful of in the last four years, would win their 13th consecutive playoff series. They win these games, so far.

The Lakers lead the best-of-seven series, three games to two, having won consecutive games, with tonight’s at Staples Center, where they’d won 17 games in a row ... until Game 3.

That was all before the dunk, the single shot that could define a series and the Lakers, pretty on the way in, spit out with floor burns and limps, and in between having done just enough to advance.

“It happened too fast,” Coach Phil Jackson said. “What I saw was him going down on his nose on the floor and sliding into their bench.”

At the moment in Game 5 when it still wasn’t decided if the Timberwolves, full of game and Kevin Garnett, would be allowed to press the Lakers into the fourth quarter and into the final games of the series, Bryant chose to end it. He darted from the corner, swooped from the right, rose up and went away, and then threw down on 14 feet of defenders.

The air left the building, the series maybe, and Bryant kneaded his ailing right shoulder, and on the next possession, from the same starting point on the floor, he made a three-pointer.

“I saw it,” Bryant said Wednesday afternoon, when the Lakers gathered again in El Segundo, for another practice on another off day, elimination day near again. Three years ago, the Lakers lost five games when they could have eliminated their opponent. In the last two championship seasons, they have not lost one of those games. The survivor plays the winner of the San Antonio-Phoenix series.

“There was a moment,” Bryant said, “when I disappeared. I couldn’t see me through the seven-footers.”

After three games, the Timberwolves had won twice, once in a blowout and then at Staples, where the Lakers hadn’t lost in more than two months. Garnett was too long and athletic, and Troy Hudson was too shifty, and Anthony Peeler was too hard-nosed. The full-court pressure wearied Bryant, and Shaquille O’Neal hadn’t completely shaken the tumultuous events that concluded the regular season and started the postseason. The Lakers appeared old, and the Timberwolves looked hungry, and then Rick Fox was hurt.

Since then, the Lakers have won twice, Tuesday by 30 points at Target Center, where the Timberwolves lost eight times in the regular season. The Lakers seem to have the hang of the Timberwolves, who perplexed the Lakers with Garnett and Hudson, but now have no one to match up with Bryant, and no two to stand with O’Neal.

Derek Fisher has made 19 of 30 three-pointers. Robert Horry, after missing his first 12 of the series, made two Tuesday. They no longer commit turnovers against the full-court pressure, and they hounded Wally Szczerbiak into four turnovers and nine points in Game 5.

Rather than be frightened off by the pressure, as they were in the middle of the series, the Lakers attacked it. They went to the rim, or to the wing, and Jackson said there is a history of such defensive tactics that usually end with good players bent at the waist, gasping.

“One of the things I told these players was that Minnesota’s pressure defense is a great ploy, but you can’t play players longer than 35 minutes, or 32 minutes of an NBA game if they’ve got to play full-court pressure,” he said. “One of the best coaches on America’s basketball scene, Rick Pitino, has had two chances in the NBA playing his full-court defense, in Boston and New York, and we’ve seen those teams wilt....

“After the 35th minute, those legs go out from underneath you. You don’t have the lungs to do that full-court work. This is a marathon race and these players are quarter horses. They’re not long-distance runners. The kind of energy Kevin Garnett gives you out there, on offense and defense and then trying to double-team and set picks at 30 feet and then get to the basket on a rebound, it’s just a lot of ground he’s covering. So, he’s tired. And I think Hudson’s tired a little bit, but we’re not going to count on that being a factor. We’re going to have to extract that.

“I think they’ll use pressure to some level, but I think they’ll have to reconsider it. We’ve handled the pressure. We only had seven turnovers in the course of [Game 5]. They obviously don’t want us to come down and dictate in the half court. So, the zone and whatever they can do in the zone to try to dictate where we’re going to put the ball is their next option.”

Bryant thought he looked a bit like a surfer, at the crest, then in the tube, everything crazy for a moment, then done, the ball gone. He thought he might never come out, and then he did, thrown out, on his hands and knees, but OK.

“It was fun to watch,” he said, grinning.