Lakers Don’t Want Future to Go to Waist

Live by the miracle, die by the miracle.

Two days after Robert Horry’s shot spun out, but before Game 6 when they got the really bad news, Laker people were still shaking their heads. Paul Sunderland said he’d just seen more replays, including one slow-mo showing the ball seeming to hang in the basket, below the rim, before somehow jumping back out.

“It wasn’t to be,” Sunderland said.

Not that anyone in Lakerdom was too worried. The Lakers would swamp the Spurs in Game 6 and win Game 7 in San Antonio too, because everyone said no one could beat the Lakers four times.

This was meaningless, except as a statement of belief suggesting the depth of local overconfidence, but the way Laker players and fans insisted on it, you’d have thought it was on the tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai.

After that, the Lakers would stroll past the Kings without Chris Webber, or those cute little Mavericks, before plowing under the usual beneath-contempt East entry for title No. 4.

Nevertheless, it was eerie ...

For three years, the ball didn’t come back out. On the contrary, it followed Horry all over, no matter how far from the hoop he camped, hopping away from the other nine players until it found him so he could pick it up and drop another magic three-pointer.

Not that anyone here cared to think about it, but without their Age of Miracles, the three-year Laker run would have been a lot shorter, assuming they had a run at all.

No rally from 15 behind in the fourth quarter against Portland in Game 7 and there goes their 2000 title.

No reconciliation between Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, who had feuded publicly for months, at the end of the next season and there goes 2001.

No Horry three-pointer against the Kings in Game 4, capping a rally from 20 points down, and there goes the 2002 title, too, and your entire dynasty.

Their heroics were at once a virtue -- good teams find ways to win -- and a facade, obscuring the problems, which were soon forgotten in the wake of their latest triumph.

After all the calamities that befell them this season, they still thought they were bulletproof, right up until Thursday night, when the Spurs shot them so full of holes you could see daylight coming through them.

For dynasts with tears running down their faces watching their reign slip away, the standards are higher, not lower.

Phil Jackson’s Chicago Bulls had their own problems, but goofing off wasn’t one. He could play Easy Rider with them and they’d still keep going.

Jackson always worries about the toll the extra month required to win a title takes, so after the Bulls set a record with 72 wins, he really eased off. So they only won 69 games, tying the old record they’d just eclipsed.

The next season, they didn’t have Scottie Pippen until January and Dennis Rodman began acting up.

So they only won 62.

A cavalier air was one thing with the businesslike Bulls, something else with the Lakers. With the Lakers, the question wasn’t why they lost but how they went three years before their antics caught up with them.

The Lakers are still O’Neal’s team, reflecting his character. Like the little girl with the little curl, when they’re good, they’re very, very good.

Then there are the other times ...

Shaq, who once told teammates that when he won a title, he’d come back looking like the Hindenburg, turned out to be as good as his word, however whimsical. He was like a horse in a handicap race; every time he won, he’d show up 25 pounds heavier the next time out.

After their second title, he announced he would drop down to 300 pounds. Instead, he came back closer to 400 and spent the usual three months playing himself into shape.

After the Lakers won their third title, he deferred his toe surgery and wasn’t his old self until March.

Now his plans for the summer are of keen interest. Not that people are skeptical, but Saturday, when Jackson said he plans to take Shaq to his own personal trainer so they can work out together, the press people laughed, thinking he was joking.

“Are you serious?” asked a reporter.

“Serious as rain,” Jackson said.

No one could ask O’Neal, who blew off the exit interview (and press gathering), which Jackson said he expected and accepted, although he also called it “disrespectful.”

But that’s Shaq. The summers are his time. This one just started earlier.

Then there’s personnel, or what was left of it.

Owner Jerry Buss is now a staunch advocate of fiscal restraint, as his team knocks down profits of $40-50 million annually. At midseason, he noted he had spent $58 million on this roster and what was cheap about that?

The Lakers were then No. 7 in the West so the answer was: If $58 million doesn’t buy you enough, then it’s too little.

(For those moved by Buss’ plight, my favorite rabble-rousers, Joe McDonnell and Doug Krikorian of ESPN Radio, took up a collection to help him buy new players. At last word, they were up to $50.)

Jackson who has enough clout to influence decisions, signed off on a status quo approach, giving their $4.5-million exception to Devean George (who could have been secured for $1.3 million if they had picked up his option the year before, which the now cost-conscious Lakers rarely do these days).

For their long-sought backup for O’Neal, they tried a basic guy-off-the-street move, acquiring the twig who turned out to be their opening night center, Soumaila Samake.

Meanwhile, the Spurs brought in Manu Ginobili, Speedy Claxton and Kevin Willis, and the Kings, who were already loaded to bursting, got Keon Clark.

Then, after the Lakers stumbled out of the gate, making it obvious they needed help, they still let the Kings beat them to the unemployed Jim Jackson, who wound up knocking Hedo Turkoglu out of the rotation.

The Lakers’ rally was merely adequate, not enough to get them even one series at home. Nor were they threatened enough to tighten their defense, which was still No. 9 last season, as uninspired as it was, and dropped to No. 21.

Minnesota’s Troy Hudson shredded them in the first round, requiring them to make yet another comeback, from 16 points down in the third quarter of Game 4 to keep from going down, 3-1.

Then the Spurs sliced and diced them. At one point in Game 5, San Antonio scored on 14 of 17 possessions, building the 25-point lead the Lakers almost took from them.

How spent were the Lakers? There weren’t enough of them to start with, there were fewer now and in the face of superior numbers (the Spurs’ bench outscored theirs, 198-89), they looked like they were out on their feet.

In Game 6, San Antonio scored on 15 of 17 possessions, turning a 62-59 lead into 91-74, complicating the Laker game plan, which was to make the young Spurs choke.

By then, even the unsinkable Bryant got it. The Lakers were second best, at least.

“It’s not a big gap,” Kobe said Saturday. “We obviously want to get more athletic to be able to keep up with these teams....

“If we defeated San Antonio, that would have been an incredible victory for us.”

They finished only one miracle shy, which is a miracle in its own right.

Even now, there’s serene confidence among them that everything can be fixed over the summer, which, like everything else in Lakerdom, is overdone.

Indeed, there are a lot of good players -- including Karl Malone and Gary Payton -- advertising their desire of joining up. Nevertheless, it hasn’t happened yet.

The Lakers hope to get Pippen on a minimum $1.4-million deal. Insiders say 1) Scottie won’t work that cheap and 2) Portland owner Paul Allen is likely to offer a $10-million, two-year deal just to keep him away from the Lakers.

Similarly, the Kings are wooing every free agent they think the Lakers want and will probably offer Clark an extension, to keep him away from the Lakers.

Nor will the Lakers be the only ones getting better. The Spurs, who, you may have noticed, were already pretty good, are expected to make a run at New Jersey’s Jason Kidd with their $14 million worth of camp space.

The Age of Miracles is over. From now on, it’s about paying the price. The Lakers had better hope they still have enough, spiritually and materially, with or without that $50.