Jazz forcing Lakers to sit up and take notice

Here’s the weather forecast for tonight’s Game 4 in Laker Hell:

A high-pressure area over the underworld that will produce gale-force sulfurous fumes. Highs expected in the 200s.

Welcome to Utah, where Laker aspirations, or hubris, go to die, even this time when the Lakers looked so powerful and the Jazz looked out on its feet.

Now, 11 days after Utah Coach Jerry Sloan said his team’s prospects were “bleak,” the Jazz has a chance to tie their first-round series, after having come from 13 points behind in Game 3 to keep from falling out of it.

Happily for the Lakers, they’re approaching this as a basketball series, not a showcase.

If it were a showcase, they would have already failed the audition.

Going into their home run trot a tad early, they let a 22-point lead dwindle to nine in Game 1, and a 20-point lead dwindle to three in Game 2.

After they blew that 13-point lead and lost Game 3, Lakers Coach Phil Jackson actually welcomed reports that Utah center Mehmet Okur will return in Game 4, since it might wake his players up.

“I think it’d be good for us,” Jackson said. “I think that’s what we need. We need to have a [Utah] lineup out there that challenges us and makes us play the way we should play.”

Congratulations to Utah, then, for staying alive until it could finally field a lineup the Lakers notice.

Starting the postseason, with Andrew Bynum having just averaged 17 points in the four games since his return, with routs of red-hot Denver and motivated Utah, the Lakers looked on the verge of putting it all together and becoming a juggernaut.

Now, the Lakers haven’t put anything together for long.

Through three games of this series, Bynum is averaging seven points, three rebounds and four fouls in 20 minutes.

If Okur returns, obliging Bynum to guard high-scoring Carlos Boozer instead of screen-setting Jarron Collins, Jackson is even considering starting Lamar Odom in Bynum’s place.

A lot of other things that were working last spring, like Jordan Farmar and Sasha Vujacic, aren’t working as well now.

Farmar is barely working at all, sitting out Game 3 with the New Jordan, Shannon Brown, taking his minutes.

Brown has been a minor sensation, but how long can that continue? A career 25% three-point shooter when he arrived, he’s 11 for 15 as a Laker but will have to keep proving it.

After Brown made a three in Game 2, Deron Williams, who had been laying off him, asked Sloan whether he should play him honest.

No, said Sloan.

Sure enough, Brown and Trevor Ariza, on fire in Games 1 and 2, were a combined four for 13 in Game 3.

Of course, getting Bynum up, running and integrated into what the Lakers do would make up for a lot of smaller problems, but it hasn’t happened yet.

“It’s tough to not be on the court,” Bynum said, “but other than that, I think once I get back in the groove, everything will be all right.

“I missed a lot of basketball. The first couple of games back, I did OK, just off adrenaline, but now it’s getting your timing back, knocking the rust off, and it’s taking a little while.

“I felt better the first couple games than I do now. Maybe that’s just the excitement of being back. But now that I’m back and people are adjusting to what I’ve started doing, taking charges, trying to push me out, quick double-teams, it’s just different. It’s just something I’ve got to adjust to.”

Then there’s the Lakers’ attitude, which is too close to casual for this time of year.

The Lakers had effective control of Game 3, and the series, after hitting the reeling Jazz with a 25-8 run to go up, 64-51, starting the second half, but the Utah reserves, led by hustling Matt Harpring, cut it to 68-60 going into the fourth quarter.

“We let down our guard,” Jackson said Friday. “We stopped playing the defense that got us there and let them back in.”

Overmatched or not, Jazz teams never stop playing, part of the reason why the Lakers had so many misadventures here, from Magic Johnson’s outburst about Coach Paul Westhead in 1981; to Pat Riley ending his players’-coach days, torching Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and James Worthy in 1988; to the Shaquille O’Neal-Kobe Bryant team’s losses in 1997, the year of Bryant’s four airballs; and 1998, when O’Neal got Nick Van Exel traded for joking about going to Cancun before the Jazz finished sweeping them.

A year ago, the Lakers led, 2-0, lost Game 3, then saw Bryant hurt his back as they lost Game 4.

Bryant’s teammates had to come to his rescue, for once, in Game 5, when the Jazz took them deep into the fourth quarter, before succumbing.

If these Jazz can’t scare the Lakers, maybe the memory of those Jazz can. In any case, something better.

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mark.heisler@latimes.com