Time to Put Their Cards on the Table

By the time the Lakers arrive at Target Center tonight, Kevin Garnett presumably will have dismounted the press table.

It can be a long way down in the NBA’s middle playoff rounds, as any number of the counter-scaling Maloof boys of the last half-decade would ruefully corroborate.

But, while the Minnesota Timberwolves were playing themselves away from their thin postseason history and celebrating it well, finally on Wednesday night after eliminating the Sacramento Kings, the Lakers had played to make something of what had long been expected of them.

With that come the best-of-seven Western Conference finals, the Timberwolves not 48 hours between the biggest games the organization has ever seen, the Lakers going on six days since finishing off the San Antonio Spurs and two years since finishing their championship three-peat.

“We’ve been in this situation before, so I think we’ve got a little bit of a mental edge,” Shaquille O’Neal said.

Garnett’s Timberwolves will play on short recovery, but with home-court advantage starting with tonight’s Game 1. That combination sent the Lakers to the airport Thursday afternoon in search of events speedy and dramatic.

If they are to advance past the Timberwolves, the Lakers will require at least one win in Minneapolis.

“The quicker we do it,” forward Rick Fox said, “the better.”

In the same fix against the San Antonio Spurs, the Lakers waited until the final four-tenths of a second of Game 5, won their road game then and beat the Spurs at Staples Center in Game 6 going on a week ago. As they come upon the Timberwolves, who all but had to hold each other upright in the final seconds Wednesday night, Sam Cassell moving as though wearing an iron corset, the Lakers pondered the possibility that the Timberwolves were vulnerable, then talked around it.

“I’m not going to make any projections,” Coach Phil Jackson said. “But I think whenever you’re in a playoff situation where the tension’s high, you’re going to work on adrenaline, and guys can play ball and get after it still. I know there’s many situations with players I’ve played with and players I’ve coached who have said the amount of sleep they get in the last month of the season is minimal. And they still have to play at a level that’s very high, even though the shooting’s not as good, the legs are a little tired. You can see it in Minnesota. And, obviously, they’re nicked up a little bit.”

Mainly, that’s Cassell, the enduring, hard-nosed point guard who won two championships with the Houston Rockets in the previous decade. In an off-season made memorable by the Laker acquisitions of Karl Malone and Gary Payton, the Timberwolves slipped veterans Cassell, Latrell Sprewell and Michael Olowokandi onto their roster. Olowokandi has since played himself to the end of the bench, though most expect him to receive playing time behind Ervin Johnson against O’Neal, who is gaining momentum as June nears.

The Lakers took a little longer to get their veteran acts together, which is why they’ll play from a disadvantage of trying to win another series without home-court advantage. But Payton seems happy now, and Malone has mostly recovered from a midseason knee-ligament tear and a second-round ankle sprain.

More importantly, Kobe Bryant and O’Neal are in full playoff mode, which means Bryant is looking for O’Neal on offense and O’Neal is paying everyone back by defending the basket. Though these times of Laker placidness can be fleeting in the regular season, once they reach mid-May they often stay, though Bryant has a pretrial hearing scheduled for the same day as Game 4.

Told Thursday that Jackson said he’d be “the thrust and the focus of our offense,” O’Neal grinned a little and said, “Then I’m ready to go to work.”

The clumsiness of the middle and late months of the season, a period that included the Lakers’ first-round series against the Rockets, gave way to a much more integrated effort against the Spurs, who had won 17 consecutive games before the Lakers won four in a row.

“I think we’ve settled in on finally playing some defense,” Fox said.

The Timberwolves are carrying momentum as well, if perhaps on wearier legs.

Cautioned Malone: “They could be riding the emotion of winning that Game [7, against the Kings.] ... I think they’ll be excited for Game 1. I don’t think they’ll be vulnerable.”

After spending two weeks guarding Tim Duncan, Malone again draws the series’ most difficult defensive assignment in Garnett. The Lakers will run the occasional double-team at the league most valuable player, but mostly it will be Malone, who’ll be waiting when Garnett comes down from the table.

“I don’t have anything to say,” Malone said, “other than, ‘Let’s go play.’ ”