Add an Identity Crisis to Problems for Lakers

When you think of these Lakers, you think of ... what?

Drama? Bickering superstars?

That stuff might carry the off-day stories, but it’s six games into the playoffs and they still have not developed an identity on the court.

When it comes to a team personality the Lakers are as generic as those rap video dancers who get recycled song after song.

It’s tough for a group to put its stamp on a playoff series when there’s no logo. Who exactly are the Lakers? An inside team? Long-distance shooters? Defensive specialists? Or scoring fiends?

They keep morphing and shifting before our eyes, like the T-1000 in “Terminator 2.”

With the San Antonio Spurs you know exactly what you’re going to get. They’ll use Tim Duncan’s fundamentals, Tony Parker’s speed and Manu Ginobili’s hustle and then, when things get as tight as they did in the fourth quarter of Game 1 of the Western Conference semifinals Sunday, they turn to what they do better than anyone else in the league: defense.

They squeezed 11 fourth-quarter turnovers from the Lakers and raced back from a five-point deficit to take an 88-78 victory.

“Instead of just executing, we tried to have that knockout blow,” Karl Malone said. “Against a good team like that, they just continued to do what they’re capable of doing.”

Even when the Lakers had it going well they didn’t look like the Lakers.

They used three three-pointers during a surge that swung them from an eight-point deficit to a seven-point lead in the third quarter. The Lakers were 25th in the league in long-distance shooting this season, so launching from downtown won’t be their path to success.

You can’t make it up as you go along during the playoffs. This is no time to experiment.

In the championship runs that seem so much longer ago with each day, the Lakers were a deliberate, sharp-executing team that pounded opponents inside with Shaquille O’Neal, then let Kobe Bryant slam the door. That was the script and they stuck to it.

Now they forget about O’Neal for long stretches, even when he has it going well the way he did during the third game of the Houston series.

Even when O’Neal scores he isn’t the automatic two he once was. He missed three straight shots from point-blank range on one sequence in Game 1. And when he gets fouled he’s missing his free throws. (Hey, we’ve found one constant with the Lakers: He missed 10 of 13 from the line Sunday.)

So the Lakers keep tinkering. Malone just started to shoot at will in the last two weeks of the season. He made big shots against Houston, but he still thinks before shooting and that can result in games like his three-for-10 afternoon Sunday. When he’s shooting it deprives the Lakers of perhaps their best passer in the set offense.

Gary Payton remains at odds with Phil Jackson and still wants to attack opposing point guards the way they go at him. In one third-quarter sequence, Parker blew by Payton for a reverse layup, so Payton came back and tried to score on Parker in the paint. Payton missed, the rest of the Lakers were not in position to get back on defense, and Parker pushed the ball upcourt for a short jumper of his own in the paint.

With the Lakers getting nothing from the offense, Bryant had to take over. He was spectacular in the third quarter, when he scored 12 points. This was one time when he had to take all of the shots; no one else was getting it done.

The problem is that when he begins doing his thing the rest of the Lakers start standing around watching. And when he cooled off at the end of the third quarter (he missed six of his final eight shots in the game), the Lakers floundered in the search for a Plan B.

The Lakers panicked and tried to force the ball to O’Neal. In large part because of the Spur defense, but also because the Lakers haven’t made it a point of emphasis all season, they simply couldn’t do it. Rasho Nesterovic knocked down a Malone pass. Payton threw a lob that was batted away. Derek Fisher threw a bad entry pass. Bryant penetrated and tried to dish to O’Neal but couldn’t thread the ball through a swarm of Spurs.

Because the Lakers haven’t been running the offense the same way all season, because they don’t have a feel for each other’s games, they couldn’t accomplish the most basic task of getting the ball inside to the largest player on the court. They weren’t thinking the same thing O’Neal was thinking when the Spurs kept fronting him.

“They’ve got to know that if they front me on one side, swing the ball to the other side, and I’ll see them,” O’Neal said.

The Lakers appeared totally unprepared to attack the Spurs’ fronting of O’Neal, even though Jackson had said that was San Antonio’s strategy. It’s another sign that he has not gotten through to this team.

A team’s identity usually begins with its coach, such as Gregg Popovich’s military-precise Spurs or Jerry Sloan’s fight-you-to-the-end Utah Jazz.

The Lakers used to reflect Jackson’s confidence and swagger and belief in the triangle offense.

Now the Lakers resemble a relationship gone wrong.

We don’t even know who they are anymore.

J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Adande, go to latimes.com/adande.