NBA FINALS : LAKERS vs. CHICAGO BULLS : NOTES : Worthy to Save Stress on Ankle for Game Today

Laker forward James Worthy doesn’t plan to test his sprained left ankle until pregame warmups today.

“I don’t feel any worse,” Worthy said before Saturday’s practice at Chicago Stadium. “I’m going to go out and see what I can do today and get some treatment tomorrow.”

Worthy, averaging 21.6 points in the playoffs, scored only eight when the Lakers wrapped up the Western Conference title with a 91-90 victory over Portland Thursday night at the Forum. Worthy made three of 12 shots in 38 minutes.

“James is still really day-to-day,” Laker Coach Mike Dunleavy said. “He’s going to play, but to what degree I don’t know. The other night he was able to play, but he wasn’t himself. He was maybe 75-80%, and still that was good enough to help us win a game because he did enough good things for us defensively and kept them honest offensively, and that enabled our other guys to do some good work.”

“It’s getting better every day,” Laker trainer Gary Vitti said. “We started to do some exercises to strengthen his ankle, and he’s responding nicely to the treatment.

“We’ll know more tomorrow before the game. Until he goes on it you don’t really know what you have. And we’re not willing to put him in a situation where he’s going to explode on it until game time. We’re trying to save it all for the game.”

Tar Heel reunion: The NBA finals are a reunion for Bull guard Michael Jordan and Laker forwards Sam Perkins and Worthy, who led North Carolina to the 1982 NCAA title with a 63-62 victory over Georgetown.

“It’s great to play against those guys,” Jordan said. “I’m looking forward to it. I know Perkins is a little bit more hungry than James because he hasn’t won (an NBA title), and he’s in the same situation that I’m in.

“I hope he can wait a little while because I’ve been waiting, too.”

Who will North Carolina Coach Dean Smith root for?

“Coach Smith should be proud,” Perkins said. “I don’t know who he’s going to be rooting for, but it’s going to be hard for him.”

Worthy downplayed the reunion.

“We see each other all the time and the fact that we’re in the championship series is nothing different than when we see each other during the season.”

Waiting is the hardest part: After winning the Eastern Conference title Monday, the Bulls had to wait until Thursday to find out who they were going to meet in the finals.

“It’s been a very long week,” Bull forward Horace Grant said. “I was praying that Cliff Robinson would lose that ball (in the final minute of the Lakers’ one-point victory over Portland Thursday) and he did. I’m sorry, Cliff, but I think a nine or 10-day wait would have hurt us if they had to play a seventh game.”

Appearing in his first NBA final, Grant is nervous.

“(Friday) night my wife kept saying, ‘Why are you so quiet?’ She asked me that 50 times,” Grant said. “It’s going to be a sleepless night.”

Scoring machines: The Bulls are trying to become the fifth team in NBA history--and the first in 20 years--to win an NBA title while having the NBA scoring leader.

The four other teams that accomplished it are the 1947 Philadelphia Warriors with Joe Faulks, the 1949 and 1950 Minneapolis Lakers with George Mikan and the 1971 Milwaukee Bucks with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Malaprop of the day: Chicago center Bill Cartwright was discussing his desire to win his first NBA title when he said, “The Lakers have guys who’ve been there and they have a few Super Bowl, I mean, NBA championship rings.”

The wrong league: The Bulls continue to insist they have no interest in trading the rights to Yugoslav star Toni Kukoc, the world’s best player not in the NBA, even though Kukoc recently signed a six-year, $25-million contract with Benetton of the Italian League.

Kukoc, described as 6 feet 10 with the agility and court vision of a guard and the shooting ability of a small forward, was Chicago’s second-round pick in 1990. Laker center Vlade Divac, a former teammate on the Yugoslav national team, said Kukoc has the talent to go in the top five of the draft.

The Bulls reportedly offered Kukoc a six-year deal at $15.5 million as an antidote to the homesickness he said he would feel in the United States.

“I think he made a mistake,” Divac said. “He’s a good player. He will come after two or three or four years in Italy, but that’s too late. He needs to be in the NBA now. The NBA is a much better league than Italy. He can play too easy there.”

Add Yugoslavia: The Laker-Bull series will have great interest there, Divac said.

But not because of Divac.

“Vlade is not popular like Magic and Michael,” Vlade said of Johnson and Jordan, the two players everyone else will be watching. “They are the really big stars. In my hometown, it’s Magic, because he plays with me. The rest of Yugoslavia is half and half with Magic and Michael.”

He can’t even rate No. 1 in his hometown?

“I’m not a big star like they are,” Divac said. “Maybe because everyone there knows me personally.”

Championship run: Chip Schaefer, trainer for the Bulls, was the trainer for the Loyola Marymount basketball team during its memorable 1989-90 season.

This is Schaefer’s first season with Chicago. He has previously been strength coach with the Lakers, a staff member at Los Angeles’ Kerlan-Jobe Orthopedic Clinic and trainer for the summer pro league at Loyola.

Times staff writer Scott Howard-Cooper contributed to this story.