Trappings of success

When the clock ticked down Thursday night at Staples Center, all that was left was for Al Michaels to make the call.

Do we believe in miracles?

For a game and a quarter in their best-of-seven series against the Phoenix Suns, the Lakers had looked like the Washington Generals and the Suns like the Globetrotters. Except the Generals played better defense.

Now, time was running out on Game 3, the Lakers’ faithful were on their feet, celebrating, and the score sheet said that Kwame Brown had 19 points, six rebounds and two blocked shots. In a few years, that score sheet will be worth thousands on EBay.

The Suns’ Leandro Barbosa, who had never been hit by lightning because it couldn’t catch him, looked scorched. Steve Nash, the Phoenix puppeteer who was unable to pull all his usual strings, looked tangled.

Thursday night was supposed to be the wake before the Sunday afternoon funeral in this best-of-seven NBA first-rounder. But rumors of the Lakers’ death were premature.

Friday morning, the Suns sent out e-mails advising about ticket availability for Game 5 in Phoenix. There was a tone of surprise. You wondered if they had rented out the building.

In fact, what happened Thursday night came from common sense and sage judgment. This game was won when Phil Jackson rejected the advice of that noted TNT analyst, Charles Barkley, who kept telling the TV audience, during the Suns’ Game 2 rout in Phoenix, what Jackson had to do to win Game 3. Run with the Suns, the Chuckster said.

Instead, Jackson, who has won nine NBA titles as a coach -- approximately nine more than the Chuckster -- ran at the Suns. With waves of defenders. With instructions to double-team and trap. With intent to impede and disrupt, especially Nash, through whom all things flow for Phoenix.

“We got Nash to stop and reset his offense,” Jackson said. “That was the key to winning.”

This is why Jackson gets $10 million a year and the rest of us scrape by.

Thursday night’s victory was crucial on several fronts. The Lakers hadn’t merely gone to Phoenix and dropped a couple of competitive games. In Game 2, they had stunk the joint out. In our Hollywood Showtime existence, losing isn’t acceptable, and losing embarrassingly is a mortal sin.

A sweep could have heralded a stampede away from Staples next season. In other places, bad sports teams are tolerated with a sense of civic duty. In Los Angeles, we commiserate at the beach, our wallets with us.

Even a proud and traditionally great franchise such as the Lakers is not bulletproof in L.A. After the Game 2 debacle, and the first quarter of Game 3, the only question about the future of this team seemed to be whether Kobe Bryant would continue to go one-on-five or demand to be traded.

For the good of the franchise, Jackson had a huge burden going in and had to have sensed that.

There was no playoff buzz in the place before the game. One indication was Lakers public relations director John Black, whose job it is to make sure the movie stars are seated at good camera angles courtside. Thursday night, Black actually had time to chat with sportswriters.

There were other ominous signs.

While a woman with an operatic voice boomed out the national anthem, the videoboard panned to a shot of the Lakers’ Andrew Bynum, at 19 the future, but certainly not the present, of this team. Bynum, head down, looked as jazzed as a guy going to the dentist.

Then the Suns were introduced and Nash actually drew a smattering of cheers.

In a dreadful first quarter for the Lakers, Brown had several easy scoring opportunities and, more often than not, clanked the ball off the back of the rim or squibbed it out of his hands.

A few months ago, during an L.A. Sports and Entertainment Commission NBA 101 seminar at Staples, Jackson was asked about Brown’s reputation for having bad hands. He didn’t confirm or deny but answered by saying, “Just don’t let him hold the baby.”

Vultures were circling, but somewhere after that first period, the clipboards came out and the collective brain trust of Jackson, Kurt Rambis, Frank Hamblen, Jim Cleamons and Brian Shaw put the Xs and 0’s in Nash’s face. And the worm turned.

Now, it is a chess game, and that’s what makes the NBA playoffs so fascinating. Game 4 is Sunday at Staples, and Mike D’Antoni, the Suns’ coach, is no slouch himself at moving the pawns.

Is this series still the domain of the Suns? Probably.

Did Thursday night’s Lakers comeback create a blueprint for more of the same? Possibly.

Can the Lakers get another perfect game and 45 points from Kobe, along with 19 from Brown and 18 points and 16 rebounds from Lamar Odom?

Could a bunch of ragtag amateur hockey players from the United States beat the Soviet pros in an Olympic game?

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com.To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.