Lakers Rule From the Center

Freshly 32, Shaquille O’Neal walked through the locker room at Staples Center on Sunday and said, “One more year,” as though he carried the burden of it across his shoulders.

It is, of course, where the Laker season appears to lie again, with barely more than a month left before the playoffs, O’Neal practically having to step over Kobe Bryant and Karl Malone to get from the bench to the court.

No team moves from hopeful to resigned and back as quickly as the Lakers, though they’ve played just well enough to win 10 of 12 games since the All-Star break. That includes Sunday’s 94-88 victory over the New Jersey Nets, themselves light a superstar, not to mention a center who could stand with the Lakers’.

“Shaq’s Shaq,” Net Coach Lawrence Frank said softly, leaving out, and the East is the East.

O’Neal had 32 points and nine rebounds. He made 10 of 14 free-throw attempts. Gary Payton had 18 points and nine rebounds. The Lakers assembled something like a defense in the second half, sending them out on the last trying trip of the season with something like satisfaction.

Phil Jackson would call it “real important for us” as they went off on a four-gamer through Utah, Boston, Minnesota and Chicago.

Yet, even as O’Neal and the Lakers played back from a nine-point, third-quarter hole, Bryant stood near the corner of the court, fielding questions on national television about his sprained shoulder and April court dates.

Told last week, before the shoulder injury, that Bryant might miss first-round playoff games because of pretrial hearings, Jackson had replied, “Ouch,” which only began to reveal the organization’s thorough disappointment. Bryant told ABC his reaction was, “Same as [Jackson’s]. But we’ll just have to see how it works.”

Later, as teammates rushed off to the airport and his wife and daughter waited in the corridor, Bryant sighed and said, “It’s an odd year.”

In it, every once in a while, the Lakers have played some basketball, just enough to stay in the top half of the Western Conference playoff standings.

Since late January, it’s where O’Neal has come in. Not much for the regular season in recent years, O’Neal has played significant minutes and, with Bryant until Friday, scored the important points, nearly 27 a game since Feb. 1. Bryant grabbed his shoulder in the first minute Friday night and O’Neal scored 32 points that night, just as he would against the Nets. Over the weekend, armed with Payton and a lot of guys missing jump shots, O’Neal made 21 of 35 field-goal attempts and 22 of 30 free-throw attempts, and looked exhausted.

“The guys were looking for me,” O’Neal said, later adding, “that should be the game plan for every game.”

He scored with handfuls of Nets dangling from his arms and while tumbling over the first row and while hanging merrily from the rim, Net centers falling deeper into foul trouble, the rest, without Jason Kidd, unable to keep up. With a small lineup that pressed and ran the pressing and running Nets, the Lakers went from nine points down to two points up in six minutes of the third quarter. O’Neal and Payton and Derek Fisher scored all but one of the Lakers’ 25 points in the quarter, while Net forward Richard Jefferson was embarking on a streak of 12 consecutive misses from the field.

The Laker lead was 11 with about three minutes remaining in the game, in part because O’Neal made four of five free throws in the final quarter and the rest of the Lakers combined to make seven of 13 field goals. Without a center, the Nets scored an astounding 58 points in the paint, but only 22 in the second half. The last of 19 lead changes came with 10:28 left, when a 19-foot jumper by Devean George put the Lakers ahead, 73-72.

“We did better in the second half adjusting defensively and keeping them on the outside where they couldn’t take shots,” Jackson said. “Fortunately for us, they didn’t hit as many as they did in the first half and we were able to sustain it.”

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Second-Half Shaq

Comparing Shaquille O’Neal’s numbers before and after the All-Star break:

*--* CATEGORY Before After Laker record 31-19 10-2 Field goal % 56.3 64.2 Free throw % 51.8 47.8 Rebounds 10.9 9.8 Blocks 2.3 2.7 Assists 3.0 2.8 Points 20.8 25.3

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