Lakers Find Themselves in an Inevitable Situation

If it seems the Lakers only just left the floor after losing to the San Antonio Spurs in the Western Conference semifinals, it is only because some of them kept the strain of the last year to themselves.

It is again May and these are again the Spurs, beginning today, best of seven.

On the edges, the Lakers are fixed up and the Spurs are redone. But it is again the series of Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, of Tim Duncan and Tony Parker. It is again the series that, if expert opinion counts for anything, will produce the eventual NBA champion, for the fifth time in six years. The Lakers won the title the other year, 2000, without having to play the Spurs.

Asked Saturday, on the eve of Game 1, if it felt as if they’d only just done this, Phil Jackson shook his head.

“No. It’s a long year,” the Laker coach said almost wearily. “It’s been a long time.”

They’ll have had three days to recover from their five-game, first-round series against the Houston Rockets. It has been more than two weeks since their regular season ended in Portland, jubilantly, with Bryant’s two incredible three-pointers that moved the Lakers from the top playoff bracket to the bottom, the Spurs’.

This week Duncan called a series with the Lakers “inevitable,” and he’d find no argument in Los Angeles, where Saturday the Lakers prepared again for the Spurs, same time this year.

Last May 15, the Lakers left the postseason bound for a rebuild. And, this afternoon, Karl Malone and Gary Payton stand in their starting lineup, Malone across from Duncan, Payton across from Parker.

They lost and not three months later Bryant had been arrested and charged with felony sexual assault, leading to a tumultuous summer and a chaotic season and, as he will attend a pretrial hearing on the morning and afternoon of Game 4, there has been no postseason letup.

The contracts of more than half their roster -- Bryant, Malone, Payton and Derek Fisher among them -- could expire in the coming weeks. Jackson fell out of his own negotiations at about midseason.

It wouldn’t seem to Jackson, who could be coaching against his last opponent, that the Lakers only just finished that series against the Spurs. It wouldn’t seem like it to Bryant. O’Neal fought for a contract extension and, so far, lost, and Payton demanded playing time and, so far, lost. Fisher, a critical member on three championship teams and a starter on two, lost his job to Payton.

“Too much has happened,” Fisher said.

So little of it easy too. They looked good in the preseason photographs, standing next to each other with smiles nearly as broad as their shoulders. They won 18 of their first 21 games, especially convincing considering O’Neal and Bryant had renewed their feud in the hours before the season opener and everybody ducked for cover.

“It’s been too much of a year -- everything we’ve got going, personnel changes, Kobe -- to really feel like last year’s playoffs were a week ago.... That was that year, this is this year,” Fisher said. “I think that plays to our advantage. We don’t have to concern ourselves with the way that ended last year and we have to resurrect the demons and do all this different stuff to cure our mistakes from last year.

“This is a totally (laugh) new year. New teams. They made about as many changes as we did. So, the four or five core guys for both teams that have been there remember last year and the years before that. Still, there are a lot of key guys that have no clue about Spurs-Lakers rivalries and the things that have happened in the past.”

As a result, Fisher said, though last year’s series ended in six games, today’s game will not feel like the seventh, the game they could not force. They’ll leave that second-half collapse, those fourth-quarter tears, where they belong, a year past.

There is plenty, he said, to separate the two.

“I think a lot of it is about this season,” he said. “It hasn’t been what a lot of people anticipated or expected in terms of us being able to come together and trying to maybe win 70 games and, not really coast along, but build a momentum in a way that would allow us to force our will on teams.”

If it looked like a grind, it’s because it was. And, still, here they are. Here they both are.

“We worked at this,” Fisher said. “To get ourselves together and be able to come back -- however we came back and won the division -- that took some energy to do, to play the second half of the season as opposed to the way we played the first half took some energy. We had injuries. We had a lot of stuff going on. All that stuff takes energy. We’re now in a position where it’s zero-zero. New team. New series. We have to start mounting that energy again.”