Dunleavy Muses on Old, New Lakers

Twelve years ago, Clipper Coach Mike Dunleavy was seven days into his second season as Laker coach when Magic Johnson made the stunning announcement that he was HIV positive.

The shell-shocked Lakers, NBA finalists only a few months earlier, stumbled through an up-and-down season under the specter of the sad, startling news of Johnson’s retirement, and lost in the first round of the playoffs.

This season, the Lakers will pursue a fourth championship in five years under the cloud of a sexual assault charge against Kobe Bryant.

Dunleavy sees no parallel.

“It would only be [similar] if Kobe didn’t play the whole year,” Dunleavy said Tuesday at College of the Desert, where the Clippers have convened for six days of practice. “Only if something came out right at the start of the season and all of a sudden it was like, ‘You know what? I’m not playing this year.’ ”

Otherwise, “I don’t think it’s anywhere near the same magnitude.”

This season’s Lakers, Dunleavy said, will go through a period of adjustment as Bryant adapts to increased scrutiny and they integrate newcomers Karl Malone and Gary Payton into the lineup, but he predicted that “within a couple of months they’ll be rocking and rolling. They’ve got a lot of talent.”

In 1991, when less was known about HIV and AIDS, the Lakers believed that Johnson had been handed what was tantamount to a death sentence.

“It wasn’t even about what it was going to do to us as a team in terms of wins and losses,” Dunleavy said. “It was so much more. This was your friend. That was the hardest part. At that time, we didn’t know, would the guy live two years? Three years? Twenty years? Nobody knew. That was the emotion behind that.”

Then, as now, the Lakers believed they were a championship team. They’d won five titles with Johnson in the 1980s and in their first season under Dunleavy reached the NBA Finals in the spring of 1991, losing to the Chicago Bulls.

“We thought we were there,” Dunleavy said. “We thought we were going to be right back because we’d added Sedale Threatt as a backup [to Johnson], which we needed. Thank God for that because when Magic was out ... we had to have [a veteran point guard]. We wouldn’t have made the playoffs if we hadn’t made that move.”

Late in October 1991, Johnson flew with the Lakers to Utah for an exhibition game but returned home before the game because of an undisclosed illness.

Dunleavy phoned Mitch Kupchak, who at the time was the Lakers’ assistant general manager. The coach asked why, if Johnson wasn’t feeling well, he hadn’t asked Dunleavy if he could skip the trip.

A stricken Kupchak told Dunleavy there was more to the story.

“I’m scared to death,” Dunleavy said Kupchak told him.

“Right then,” Dunleavy said Tuesday, “I knew it was cancer or AIDS.”

Two weeks later, on Nov. 7, 1991, Johnson made his announcement in a news conference. The Lakers, running on adrenaline, lost the next night at Phoenix, but then won nine consecutive games. Then they began to falter.

With a 43-39 record, they qualified for the playoffs only by beating the Clippers on the last day of the season, a victory secured on a last-second shot by Threatt.

In the playoffs, they lost to the Portland Trail Blazers.

“Everything we did,” Dunleavy said of those Lakers, “had been built and designed, for the most part, to revolve around Magic.”