Age Could Devalue Their Title Chances

How many hundred million dollars did Shaquille O’Neal say he needed, again?

Seems like old times, or, at least, it did until the Lakers mailed in Game 2, after telling everyone how important it was.

Unfortunately for the Lakers, this isn’t exactly old times, O’Neal isn’t exactly what he was, and there really is a scenario in which the Minnesota Timberwolves, who started the series looking outgunned and out on their feet, shock the world.

The bizarre schedule, going every other day after sitting around for days on end in the first two rounds, served the Timberwolves up on a plate in Game 1, with one day off after a grueling series and an emotional Game 7 against Sacramento.

However, as Coach Flip Saunders said hopefully, or clutching at straws, Game 1 was the most energetic they would see the Lakers, who are older and may feel a lot older by Games 5, 6 and 7, when they’ll play or travel every day.

Of course, who expected the Timberwolves to last that long?

When O’Neal, free from the scourges of Yao Ming and San Antonio’s 7-footers, scored 27 points with 18 rebounds in Game 1, the world hailed him as before. A Minneapolis Star Tribune headline proclaimed, “There’s no defense for Shaq.”

Everyone seemed ready to move on to bigger triumphs. O’Neal said he wouldn’t take a Kevin Garnett-size pay cut to $20 million a year on his extension, announcing, “I won’t be devalued.”

This was how it was in their three-year run from 2000 to 2002. There was no dealing with a motivated O’Neal, who needed Kobe Bryant to get there but would be awesome at the end, winning three Finals MVPs to go with his three titles.

Now, O’Neal’s energy seems to ebb as series go on. On nights he isn’t really feeling it, he isn’t really the old Shaq, as in Game 2 when Ervin Johnson outscored him, 5-4, in the first half.

Saunders told his assistant coaches to save the halftime stat sheet for Johnson. “Erv outscored Shaq,” Saunders said. “I told him to keep it and frame it.”

The bad news for the Lakers was, this wasn’t actually a no-show for O’Neal, as his 16 rebounds suggest. When the old Shaq played that hard, you had to double-team him or he’d go for 35. In Game 2, the Timberwolves merely “crowded” O’Neal, as Bryant put it, and held him to 14.

“It really wasn’t that physical,” O’Neal, 32, said Monday, contrite and light-hearted at once. “I’m used to it. I missed a couple chippies....

“It wasn’t anything that they did. It was just me. All me.”

Well, they helped. It wasn’t easy and it took lots of them -- Johnson, Michael Olowokandi, Oliver Miller and Mark Madsen, plus Garnett, who lurked in the lane.

In the old days, playing O’Neal straight up wasn’t just hard, it was impossible. Remember the 2001 Finals when 76er Coach Larry Brown single-covered O’Neal with Dikembe Mutombo, the defensive player of the year two seasons running, and Mutombo said he didn’t fear Shaq?

O’Neal averaged 33 points and kept laying Mutombo out, wheeling shoulder-first into the lane. By the end, Mutombo had dropped the defiant pose.

Four years after O’Neal won his first title -- “four hard years,” as a Laker staffer put it -- he’s still the game’s most dominant player. But he’s not as dominant as he was, so the Lakers aren’t as dominant as they were.

As well as he played against the Spurs, O’Neal averaged 27 points in the first four games and 14 in the last two. On two or more days of rest this post-season, O’Neal is averaging 23.2 points. On one day of rest, he’s averaging 15.7.

Happily for the Lakers, he kept playing hard at the defensive end against the Spurs, taking 30 rebounds and blocking eight shots in Games 5 and 6.

Then he got almost a week off.

With rest and a healthy Sam Cassell, this would have been a tough series -- and may still be -- but, showing who they are, the Timberwolves never complained. If this had been the Kings, it would have been conspiracy-this and league-loves-Lakers-that, but in Minneapolis it never came up.

Instead, the Timberwolves went out and competed, which is what they do. When Cassell was there, they competed; when he left 43 seconds into Game 2, they competed.

They were right there until the end of Game 1. In Game 2, they came loaded for bear, or actually Fish, as in Derek Fisher, who must have thought he was a pinball.

Concerned his players might have trouble bringing the ball up with Cassell out, Saunders kept someone back to set screens. Fisher was laid out by a Latrell Sprewell pick he called “solid,” and ran into another set by Madsen.

By the time Wally Szczerbiak got him in the fourth quarter, Fisher had had it. A heated discussion with Szczerbiak ensued, after which Karl Malone ran over Darrick Martin on a screen, just to get the Lakers on the board.

“I ain’t going to sit here and lie to you, say I tried to go around him,” Malone said Monday. “I didn’t. Some people would lie right now. I didn’t try to go around him, and it probably will cost me something. So be it.”

Malone, who on Monday was indeed fined $7,500, knows all about this stuff, having watched his little buddy, John Stockton, the back-picking champion of the universe, stand up to all the big guys who ran him over, and tried in vain to get him to stop.

O’Neal, asked if you have to get one of theirs if they get one of yours, said he couldn’t answer on camera ... then bobbed his head yes, enthusiastically.

Now these teams don’t like each other. Imagine Phil Jackson, former flower child, saying this is “personal” and Fisher, their resident choirboy, agreeing.

Whatever it takes to awaken them from their slumber.

The Timberwolves have yet to show they can beat this Laker team here. Of course, every day the series stays close is another day of rest for Cassell, who’ll be back if he has to play connected by wires to his stimulation machine.

What goes around comes around. At the end of Game 2’s third quarter, Garnett punctured the Lakers’ balloon with a three-pointer after recovering the ball Malone knocked away from him.

It fell with :00.4 left, the time before Fisher’s miracle shot in San Antonio.

This time, the Lakers just inbounded the ball at the other end of the floor to Malone, who held it.

There could be more memorable plays coming than we expected. The Lakers used to be world-beaters. Now they all have to play, instead of watching O’Neal or Bryant. For the moment, the world is still alive in this one.