Spurs’ Defense Blurs Lines of Laker Triangle

The Lakers beat San Antonio last year by letting the Spurs fall back to them. They can’t keep counting on gravity to do their work anymore.

It’s going to be difficult for them to get baskets, let alone sustain runs, if they get far behind because the Spurs’ defense makes it so difficult to score.

The Spurs throw sugar in the gas pipe and sand in the transmission. They even tried the banana-in-the-tailpipe trick.

The Spurs won Game 1 of the Western Conference semifinals the same way they won all four regular-season meetings with the Lakers, by junking it up on defense and cutting up the triangle.

Phoenix shot 39% against the Spurs in the first round, which is how the Spurs won in six games and were in position to win the two games they lost. Defense was the key to that series, Spur center David Robinson said, and, “This defense is going to give us a chance to win here.”

Defense is how the Spurs won on a night they shot 37.5% and missed 14 of 35 free throws.

The Lakers were the better shooting team by making 39.5% of their shots, which is about as big a prize as winning the Miss Alaska pageant. What hurt them most was 19 turnovers forced by the Spurs, who converted them into 21 points.

Nine steals and a couple of long rebounds off missed jumpers helped the Spurs outscore the Lakers, 11-2, in fastbreak points in a game that was very short on easy baskets.

The Spurs effectively removed everyone except Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant from the Laker offense. They went with single coverage on the Laker superstars until the last second of possessions, when O’Neal and Bryant had already committed to shooting.

That meant open shots for Derek Fisher, Robert Horry and the rest of the crew were as rare as four-leaf clovers.

Robinson held his own one-on-one against O’Neal. Bruce Bowen was constantly in front of Bryant. I think he even showed up in a couple of Kobe’s Sprite commercials.

And Tim Duncan was always lurking to help out.

When it came to O’Neal and Bryant, the Spurs borrowed a line from Method Man Notorious B.I.G. -- “Everything you get, you have to work hard for it.”

Their shooting percentages reflected it. They took 58 of the team’s 86 shots and connected on 26 of them -- 44.8%. And that was much better than the rest of the team’s combined eight for 28 -- 28.6%.

“We just knew we wanted Shaq and Kobe to work for what they get and play the same team ‘D’ we played all year long,” Spur Coach Gregg Popovich said. “We know that Fisher is somebody we don’t want to have a great game, because he destroyed us so much in the past. Other than that, we have to play the same team ‘D’ we played all year or we’re going to be scrambling around, we’ll be out of whack.

“It’s either going to be good enough, or it’s not.”

On Monday night it was good enough to give the Spurs a 1-0 lead in the series, good enough to “disturb” Laker Coach Phil Jackson.

“They’re making us do everything off the dribble,” Jackson said. “They’re taking away passing lanes for us.

“Just go with what we can get off individual effort, is what it boiled down to.

“I was very dismayed and disturbed about our execution of our offense because of that. But you’ve got to give them credit. They were able to get in our guys’ bodies so they couldn’t make good passes, make accurate passes.”

A couple of defensive efforts demonstrated how things went for the Lakers Monday night. On one, Robinson knocked an entry pass loose and chased it toward the sidelines. The Lakers recovered and passed underneath to O’Neal. Then Duncan materialized and forced O’Neal to work around him for a dunk. Although the Lakers scored, it showed there would be no easy baskets.

Even a scrambled play that resulted in O’Neal with the ball under the basket still made the Lakers go through the league’s most valuable player and its third-leading shot-blocker to score.

Or take O’Neal’s final play of the night. He made his way past Robinson, and there was Duncan to help, causing Shaq to put a little more arc on his hook shot. It bounced off the back of the rim, and in O’Neal’s attempt to go over 14 feet of Spurs’ big men he was called for his sixth personal foul.

I like the way the Spurs’ Manu Ginobili always seems to go toward the ball at full speed. That earned him four steals in Game 1, which were as valuable as his 15 points.

He also took out Brian Shaw, the Laker Phil Jackson dubbed his X-factor. Shaw had more turnovers than assists. It was Ginobili’s steal from Shaw that led to the pivotal play of the night, when Devean George suffered a severely sprained left ankle upon landing after his attempt to block Ginobili’s shot.

But the Spurs even managed to turn the Lakers’ best-case scenarios -- O’Neal with the ball in the paint -- into a challenge. O’Neal had as many missed layups as he did dunks over Duncan and Robinson. Now the Lakers have to find a way to get back to the easy-flowing ways they found at the end of last series after finally breaking free of Minnesota’s full-court press.

“In a seven-game series, it’s about building a rhythm, getting a better understanding of a team and getting a flow offensively and defensively as the series goes on,” Bryant said.

The question is, will the Spurs let them?

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