Here is a good one by BILL PLASCHKE. Another two below. The front page top article was "
Big Four, Little Fourth" by Tim Brown.
BILL PLASCHKE
Playing as if He's Wearing GlovesBill Plaschke
May 3, 2004
SAN ANTONIO — In one corner, a veteran despaired.
"I didn't bring it," Karl Malone said. "The game I played is unacceptable."
In another corner, a veteran whined.
"We didn't do a bad job on Tony Parker defensively, we just need to go back at him at the other end," Gary Payton said. "But this is not an offense where we can do that."
In one corner, a veteran shouldered the responsibility of the Lakers' 88-78 loss to the San Antonio Spurs in Game 1 of the Western Conference semifinals.
"I did a terrible job on the defensive end…. Veterans don't make the kind of mistakes I made on offense," Karl Malone said. "This one's on me."
In another corner, a veteran passed the blame more deftly than he, with a whopping three assists, had passed the basketball.
"In Seattle, we made Tony Parker play defense too," Gary Payton said. "Here, we don't go back at him."
They say that the true measure of a man can be found not in how he achieves success, but in how he handles failure.
In their first major playoff test Sunday, the Lakers' two prize purchases failed miserably.
Afterward, one guy looked about a foot taller than the other guy.
Can we finally conclude that when the Lakers claimed to have found two championship answers last summer, they were only half right?
Malone played Sunday as if he never took his feet out of their daily ice bath, but with him, there's hope.
He missed seven of 10 shots, but they were mostly the sort of mid-range jump shots he was making in the first round against Houston.
"Those are shots I have made before, and I'll keep taking them, I'm not worried about that," he said.
He was torched on defense by Tim Duncan, who missed only five times in 18 tries and scored 30 points, but historically, Malone shoves back.
"They were aggressive, and they pushed us around a little," he said.
And about his three turnovers, including a couple of bad passes during the Spurs' 21-6 fourth-quarter run?
"My teammates are looking at me, I need to set an example, something like that is contagious," he said. "I can't be making those plays. I will get better."
With Malone, you believe it.
With Payton, you seriously wonder.
Most of the afternoon, he looked like one of those local "conventioneers" Phil Jackson is trying escape by bringing the team back to Los Angeles between Games 1 and 2.
Perpetually lost.
On offense, the Glove was an oven mitt, making only one of eight shots, throwing up one off-balance clanker at the start of the Spurs' final push, then fumbling away a rebound at the finish.
On defense, the Glove was the kind with no fingers, and the only way anybody would have believed he had done a good job on Parker was if this had been Souvenir Blindfold Day.
Parker may have made fewer than half of his shots — eight for 19, as Payton reminded everyone — but far more deadly were his penetrations.
Every time he sped past Payton, something good happened for the Spurs, with nine assists and numerous other passes that turned heads and opened spaces.
For all his running around, Parker had only one turnover.
For all his denials, Payton had zero steals.
And then Payton blames it on the fact that he's not handling the ball enough?
While the stark differences between Malone and Payton make for good locker-room drama, at this point, one wonders if it would have been better to see Malone show up last summer with someone else.
Say, Tyronn Lue.
Payton repeated Sunday that, if he had been allowed to use his height to post up Parker and draw fouls and wear him down, the defense wouldn't matter so much.
"It's a lot frustrating, it's very frustrating," Payton said. "I know I can go back at this kid."
But what makes anyone think those shots would suddenly start falling against a guy who is still twice as quick?
"The shots I'm taking right now, they're not rhythm shots," Payton said.
In other words, Payton is still complaining that the triangle offense is, well, um, the triangle offense.
Nine months after he accepted nearly $5 million to play in it.
How dare Phil Jackson!
The next time Payton thinks about opening his mouth about the triangle, of course, he should stuff a trapezoid in it.
Better yet, he should just look across the room at Malone.
This is a time when champion Lakers, from Jerry West to Kobe Bryant, have locked away their egos and trusted in the team. For all the talk about the Lakers' Big Two, they could not have won those three consecutive championships without the Other Five, from Robert Horry to Rick Fox to, yes, even Lue.
Sunday showed a different team, a thinner team, a more uncertain team.
You think Bryant shot too much and too wildly? Who else was willing to step up?
Bryant and O'Neal combined for 18 field goals Sunday, 10 more than the rest of the Lakers combined.
They took 40 shots, 11 more than the rest of the Lakers combined.
With the score tied, 69-69, Rasho Nesterovic was left wide open in front of the basket by a defense that did not rotate. The tie was broken.
After the Lakers pulled back to within two, they committed four turnovers in two minutes, all of them errors not only of commission, but confusion.
Bad pass by Derek Fisher. Bad pass by Bryant. Fumble by O'Neal. Shot-clock violation after a Bryant airball.
At times, it looked like last year's playoff losses here, and at times, you had to wonder the same thing you did then.
If only they had Karl Malone and Gary Payton.
The first guy is expected to eventually show up for this series.
The second guy may have already skipped town for good.
*
Bill Plaschke can be reached at
bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Big Four, Little Fourth
Built-for-playoffs lineup of future Hall of Famers disappears in final quarter, when Spurs outscore L.A., 26-13, to win Game 1 of West semifinals.
By Tim Brown
Times Staff Writer
May 3, 2004
SAN ANTONIO — When the fourth quarter turned loud and tense Sunday, the Lakers lost.
When victory and a piece of the San Antonio Spurs' self-assurance required composure, the Lakers put their Big Four on the floor and then went to pieces, playing like playoff trainees as their lead fell away.
In the first game of the Western Conference semifinals, the Spurs ran down the playoff-built Lakers in the final quarter and won, 88-78, at SBC Center.
Game 2 is here Wednesday night. The Lakers returned to Los Angeles on the fumes of a poorly spent fourth quarter, in which they relinquished a five-point lead and had nearly as many turnovers (11) as they did points (13).
It was in that quarter that Tim Duncan scored 12 of his 30 points and the Spurs made 11 of 21 shots, while the Lakers staggered through a run in which they were outscored, 19-2, and that included six consecutive turnovers, three by a jumpy Kobe Bryant.
For a day, it appeared the Spurs stood where the Lakers had once figured to be, riding playoff assuredness and a 16-game winning streak, five of the wins since the regular season ended, and a defense that starts everything. Conversely, the Lakers of Shaquille O'Neal, Karl Malone, Gary Payton and Bryant have yet to find something permanent to cling to, evident even in a 56-win regular season and a five-game first-round victory over the Houston Rockets.
They tried to find O'Neal, tried to establish something the Spurs might not handle, and the basketball bounced away, over and over, leading to Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili running free down the floor. The Spurs had pressed early and returned to it rigorously late, and the Lakers dragged.
Bryant "got tired and missed some open shots, but that's not the story of the game," Laker Coach Phil Jackson said. "The story of the game is our attempts to get the ball into Shaq, which caused turnovers in the fourth quarter.
"I think the fatigue caught up to us at some point. We had guys who wouldn't normally turn over the ball in a situation like that, making passes that were out of character. … That changed the course of the game from a tight game to a 10-point lead. But, by and large, we were the victim of our own inability to execute."
Although they bemoaned their 22 turnovers and their inability to make jump shots — Malone and Payton were a combined four for 18 — the Lakers had a seven-point lead late in the third quarter and a five-point lead early in the fourth. They had defended Duncan and Parker reasonably well, and Bryant had carried the offense, in a town that always has seemed to suit his game, especially this time of year.
Then, at the very place in which the Lakers would establish victory or lose their hold on it, the Spurs rushed back. Bryant scored 31 points, but ran off with the ball in the second half, when he took 17 shots and no one else took more than five. O'Neal scored 19 points but missed 10 of 13 free throws. The Lakers shot 37.7%, 27.8% in the first quarter and 33.3% in the fourth, which left a lot of work in the middle two.
"They were more aggressive," Malone said. "They were more physical and they pushed us around a little. You can't allow that to happen in the playoffs. This time of year I don't think any coach should have to give this team a pep talk. When you get a five-point lead, you have to knock them out. It's not enough to just be sure and execute and simply hold on. This time of year you either win or go home, so we better win."
The Lakers actually outrebounded the Spurs and blocked six shots — O'Neal had five — and still they said they'd been beaten physically, by the Spurs' screen-and-rolls and dogged defense.
"I know how this series is going to go," O'Neal said. "It's going to be like that. It's going to be very physical, clawing and scratching."
They scored 32 points in a third quarter that seemed to solve the Spur defense. Bryant had 12 of them and Devean George, starting again for Rick Fox at small forward, had eight. It was the worst defensive quarter of the postseason for the Spurs.
"Kobe got hot so we just tried to hang in there and get the quarter over," Parker said. "In the fourth quarter, we played better defense and they started to miss shots."
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
The Lakers and Spurs have met nine times previously in the Western Conference playoffs, and the winner of Game 1 won every series:
A third article.A. ADANDE
Add an Identity Crisis to Problems for LakersJ.A. Adande
May 3, 2004
SAN ANTONIO — When you think of these Lakers, you think of … what?
Drama? Bickering superstars?
That stuff might carry the off-day stories, but it's six games into the playoffs and they still have not developed an identity on the court.
When it comes to a team personality the Lakers are as generic as those rap video dancers who get recycled song after song.
It's tough for a group to put its stamp on a playoff series when there's no logo. Who exactly are the Lakers? An inside team? Long-distance shooters? Defensive specialists? Or scoring fiends?
They keep morphing and shifting before our eyes, like the T-1000 in "Terminator 2."
With the San Antonio Spurs you know exactly what you're going to get. They'll use Tim Duncan's fundamentals, Tony Parker's speed and Manu Ginobili's hustle and then, when things get as tight as they did in the fourth quarter of Game 1 of the Western Conference semifinals Sunday, they turn to what they do better than anyone else in the league: defense.
They squeezed 11 fourth-quarter turnovers from the Lakers and raced back from a five-point deficit to take an 88-78 victory.
"Instead of just executing, we tried to have that knockout blow," Karl Malone said. "Against a good team like that, they just continued to do what they're capable of doing."
Even when the Lakers had it going well they didn't look like the Lakers.
They used three three-pointers during a surge that swung them from an eight-point deficit to a seven-point lead in the third quarter. The Lakers were 25th in the league in long-distance shooting this season, so launching from downtown won't be their path to success.
You can't make it up as you go along during the playoffs. This is no time to experiment.
In the championship runs that seem so much longer ago with each day, the Lakers were a deliberate, sharp-executing team that pounded opponents inside with Shaquille O'Neal, then let Kobe Bryant slam the door. That was the script and they stuck to it.
Now they forget about O'Neal for long stretches, even when he has it going well the way he did during the third game of the Houston series.
Even when O'Neal scores he isn't the automatic two he once was. He missed three straight shots from point-blank range on one sequence in Game 1. And when he gets fouled he's missing his free throws. (Hey, we've found one constant with the Lakers: He missed 10 of 13 from the line Sunday.)
So the Lakers keep tinkering. Malone just started to shoot at will in the last two weeks of the season. He made big shots against Houston, but he still thinks before shooting and that can result in games like his three-for-10 afternoon Sunday. When he's shooting it deprives the Lakers of perhaps their best passer in the set offense.
Gary Payton remains at odds with Phil Jackson and still wants to attack opposing point guards the way they go at him. In one third-quarter sequence, Parker blew by Payton for a reverse layup, so Payton came back and tried to score on Parker in the paint. Payton missed, the rest of the Lakers were not in position to get back on defense, and Parker pushed the ball upcourt for a short jumper of his own in the paint.
With the Lakers getting nothing from the offense, Bryant had to take over. He was spectacular in the third quarter, when he scored 12 points. This was one time when he had to take all of the shots; no one else was getting it done.
The problem is that when he begins doing his thing the rest of the Lakers start standing around watching. And when he cooled off at the end of the third quarter (he missed six of his final eight shots in the game), the Lakers floundered in the search for a Plan B.
The Lakers panicked and tried to force the ball to O'Neal. In large part because of the Spur defense, but also because the Lakers haven't made it a point of emphasis all season, they simply couldn't do it. Rasho Nesterovic knocked down a Malone pass. Payton threw a lob that was batted away. Derek Fisher threw a bad entry pass. Bryant penetrated and tried to dish to O'Neal but couldn't thread the ball through a swarm of Spurs.
Because the Lakers haven't been running the offense the same way all season, because they don't have a feel for each other's games, they couldn't accomplish the most basic task of getting the ball inside to the largest player on the court. They weren't thinking the same thing O'Neal was thinking when the Spurs kept fronting him.
"They've got to know that if they front me on one side, swing the ball to the other side, and I'll see them," O'Neal said.
The Lakers appeared totally unprepared to attack the Spurs' fronting of O'Neal, even though Jackson had said that was San Antonio's strategy. It's another sign that he has not gotten through to this team.
A team's identity usually begins with its coach, such as Gregg Popovich's military-precise Spurs or Jerry Sloan's fight-you-to-the-end Utah Jazz.
The Lakers used to reflect Jackson's confidence and swagger and belief in the triangle offense.
Now the Lakers resemble a relationship gone wrong.
We don't even know who they are anymore.
J.A. Adande can be reached at
j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Adande, go to latimes.com/adande.
