Lakers’ Road to Glory Filled With Potholes

Somewhere along the road to greatness the Lakers took the wrong turn.

At this point they’d look more in character driving the family car in “Vacation” than handling the rig in “Road Warrior.”

They’re 3-5 in road games in these playoffs after falling to the Minnesota Timberwolves on Saturday at the Target Center, by a 98-96 score that wasn’t even close to being that close.

That’s coming off a regular season in which they went 22-19 on the road, the most road losses of any team still in the playoffs. (They were 8-6 in road games when the Fantastic Four played.)

This all comes into play because the Lakers are not yet, ahem, home free.

Soon, be it a how-did-this-happen Game 7 back here or in the NBA Finals, the Lakers will have to become a good road team if they want to win a championship.

If the Lakers can’t handle their duties in Game 6 in Los Angeles, they’ll try to win Game 7 on the road, a feat that historically has proven too much for eight out of 10 NBA teams.

If the Lakers advance and play the Indiana Pacers in the Finals, the Pacers will have home court in the 2-3-2 format series. Since the home team has never swept the middle three games, that presumes the Lakers would have to get two games in Indiana to win it.

Game 5 of the Western Conference finals sure wasn’t a blueprint for how to win an away game. Road games generally aren’t a time to count on the supporting cast. They’re more dependent on the energy of the crowd at home, less likely to get the benefits from the officials on the road.

Devean George, who had 12 points in Game 3 and drove for a crowd-pumping dunk in Game 4 at Staples Center, scored only four points and missed his last seven shots Saturday. Kareem Rush shot one for five. Slava Medvedenko was doing so little that Phil Jackson left Karl Malone in even when Malone was in foul trouble.

Road games belong to the superstars, and none of the Lakers could meet the challenge.

Kobe Bryant, who’s normally Captain Closeout, missed eight of 12 shots in the first half, then took one shot in the third quarter.

Early in the fourth quarter, Minnesota’s Kevin Garnett had as many rebounds (16) as Shaquille O’Neal and Malone combined.

O’Neal didn’t have a shot attempt of any kind in the fourth quarter until he took two free throws with 44.2 seconds remaining.

He and Bryant combined for 40 points, on a night when Garnett and Latrell Sprewell went for 58.

The Lakers’ top two players have to exceed their opponents’ two biggest stars. Especially on a night Minnesota didn’t have its third star.

Sam Cassell sat on the bench wearing jeans and a pink shirt. I know pink’s a popular color for men right now, but it would be a dramatic fashion statement to wear a pink shirt on the court in a playoff game. He couldn’t even give them a minute.

The way the Timberwolves came out they should have all been clad in passive pastels. They shot 27% in the first quarter, and the Lakers found themselves ahead by 10 points without really trying.

So they decided to stop trying. Their defensive rotations slowed down, their offense degenerated into a lot of dribbling and very little passing, and the remnants of their lead vanished with a 13-0 Minnesota run to close out the second quarter.

The 2001 and 2002 Laker championship teams rolled like John Madden’s bus, racking up a 15-2 road record in the playoffs. They took pride in silencing the thousands of voices yelling, “Beat L.A.!”

When Jackson was asked why this group that retains so many players who won big playoff road games can’t do it now, he replied, “Um, I’m not sure.”

Perhaps his answer was in his pregame comments. He described how he was filling out ticket envelopes in the coaches’ office when he heard a steady roar of laughter from the locker room. It didn’t sound like the preparations for a closeout game.

“There is an aura of pleasantness around a basketball that you like to have, but there’s business to be accomplished,” Jackson said. “I told them get their game faces on, get ready for the game.”

Jackson called the pregame mood “giddy.”

When the media entered the locker room a few minutes later the word to describe it was “empty.” After a while, O’Neal came around the corner to grab something out of his locker, smiling and laughing about something.

I asked him if he was giddy.

“Giddy?” O’Neal said. “What does that mean?”

It’s not a synonym for ready to play.

They didn’t have that mercenary attitude throughout the afternoon.

Following the game, O’Neal and Bryant joked around with Cassell and Minnesota reserve Gary Trent before boarding the bus.

In the deserted locker room a couple of room key cards from the team hotel lay on the floor, casually tossed aside. Apparently the Lakers haven’t heard that the magnetic stripes on those cards contain personal information, including credit card numbers, so they should be disposed of carefully.

Nope, not very road savvy at all.

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