Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Columnist Dean Juipe: Frustrated L.A. looks to have already imploded

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4084.

As meltdowns go, this one is right up there with Chernobyl.

Or Three Mile Island.

Or, closer to home and a little more recently, Pepcon.

It's nuclear and it's a reactor. It's the Los Angeles Lakers reduced to rubble before our very eyes, down and all but out four games into the NBA Finals.

Can you believe it? A series that every supposed expert had going to the Lakers in no more than five games is now looking as if it will go to the Detroit Pistons in five, the Pistons having won Game 4 Sunday night in Auburn Hills, Mich., by an 88-80 score to take a 3-1 lead.

If the Lakers are playing the role of drama queens waiting to pull themselves together at the last instant, they're on course for an Academy Award. They look beaten, sorry and disheveled.

This is not at all what we've come to expect from a team that's pursuing its fourth world title in five years. These are the Lakers -- Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal's Lakers -- in a deep funk that doesn't appear escapable no matter how great an influence Hollywood has on the script.

The "fluke" that was Detroit's win in Game 1 has found a sequel and it's Groundhog Day over and over for the Lakers as the Pistons repeatedly take a close game and blow it open down the stretch. Had Detroit coach Larry Brown not strategically botched the final 10 seconds of Game 2, David Stern would already have handed the champion's trophy to Pistons owner Bill Davidson -- who has his hands full as it is.

Davidson also owns hockey's Tampa Bay Lightning, which just won the Stanley Cup.

Think this guy is feeling lucky? The only thing he needs is a fresh supply of terry cloth to keep his trophies polished.

Of the 154 previous teams that trailed 3-1 in an NBA playoff series, only seven came back to win the series. And it has never happened in the Finals.

There's no sign that the Lakers will go against that grain, misplacing their offense as they have and allowing the Pistons to control such items as tempo and rebounding. With no one helping O'Neal and Bryant, Los Angeles appears as if it has squandered a championship that everyone from Portland (Maine) to Portland (Oregon) once felt was tightly within its grasp.

For the fourth consecutive game the Lakers came out promising to run and attack the glass, yet once again they were passive and resistant to change. They either dump it in to the Diesel or stand aside and watch Kobe try to shake the three defenders he's continually attracting.

This team has no depth, no bench, no spark. It is being bullied and is playing dumb.

Four games into the series the Pistons have 31 more rebounds than the Lakers and have shot 54 more free throws. Those are not incidental numbers but telltale ones, revealing a series in which one team gets the loose balls and the other commits the fouls.

Phil Jackson can whine all he wants about the officiating and the disparity in the total fouls called, but this is beyond the nuances or tastes of the referees. This is the Lakers playing as poorly as a team with four future Hall of Fame players can play.

Poor Shaq. He's playing great and doing his best to carry the club, but at 32 years old he has to be feeling as if the Lakers' last hurrah isn't going to merit much of a celebration on Sunset Strip. The team is going to be dismantled later this summer and he may be the only one invited to return.

Unless, of course, the Lakers are just playing possum, letting the tension build before flexing their vaunted muscles.

But four games into the Finals it's more like they're eating possum, having taken a seat at the dinner table with Jed and Jethro just down the street in Beverly Hills.

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