In the End, They Were All Talk

The last day of the Laker season was a long, stressful one, beginning with Coach Del Harris straightening out misunderstandings with guards Nick Van Exel and Sedale Threatt, then ending with Magic Johnson and Vlade Divac riding the bench while the Lakers made one final, fruitless rally to keep the Lake Show on the air.

“It was like an entirely different team put on a Laker uniform and showed up,” Harris said after Thursday night’s elimination from the NBA playoffs by the Houston Rockets, 102-94.

By the time this hard day’s night was over, the coach was asking if he could strike from the record any discouraging words ever spoken, while Johnson was suggesting that his teammates go home for the summer and ask themselves: “Are you really for the team, or is that just something that comes out of your mouth?”

And, if Magic himself did not remain part of this team?

“I’m a grown man. I can deal with that, if that happens,” Johnson said. “There are five, six, 10 teams that are already interested in me.”

This was the way a wonderful, 53-victory season went down the drain.

Not once did the Lakers lead in their final game after a goaltending call against Hakeem Olajuwon that made the score 3-2. Harris kept trying so hard to find a lineup that clicked that, after removing his starting center, Divac, during a TV timeout with 9:22 to play, he never put him back, while Magic sat beside Vlade on the bench from the 7:22 mark until only 72 seconds remained in the season.

Closest the Lakers got in those final 9 1/2 minutes: 98-94, with 16.8 seconds to play.

Too little, too late.

“We got outplayed and outhustled,” Van Exel said, bluntly and correctly.

If these were Laker impersonators, it was because a team that for months had excelled at shooting suddenly couldn’t (Van Exel 16 for 54, Johnson 15 for 39), while a team not known for its rebounding dominated the Rockets in that department, all four games.

For that reason and others, Harris called the series “filled with ironies.”

Mystified by shooting and turnover woes that hadn’t plagued his team previously, the Laker coach also couldn’t leave without commenting on some of the verbal exchanges that preceded the team’s season-ending game.

First thing Harris had to handle Thursday morning was an unhappy Van Exel, who came looking for the coach to explain his previous day’s remarks that Eddie Jones should be getting the ball more often and that Harris should not have removed Threatt when he did from Game 3. Van Exel assured the coach that he meant it as an observation about the entire team’s play, not about the coach himself.

“Nobody was more upset today than Nick Van Exel was,” Harris said.

Then there was the step backward Harris had to take regarding his removal of Threatt. It seems that Threatt had not asked to be taken out of the game, as Harris had believed, but had in fact been misunderstood by the coach when he was saying, “I’m in a zone! I’m in a zone!” meaning that his shooting was red-hot.

Harris took the blame for this one, then called the entire situation with Van Exel and Threatt “a tempest in a teapot.”

For his part, Johnson said the boat does occasionally need to be rocked, and that difficult things to say often need saying. On the whole though, Magic regretted “little-bitty things that we make bigger than they are,” and then added: “We’ve got to quit looking at and blaming Del. We’ve got to look at ourselves.”

The Lakers were looking for their old selves in a mirror. All they needed was a hot hand, a way to contain Olajuwon and some of their usual minimal-turnover basketball to take this series back to Inglewood.

They thought their hot shooter had materialized when Cedric Ceballos began connecting, but too many Rockets were matching him stroke for stroke, particularly Chucky Brown and Kenny Smith, as well as Robert Horry, who at times was left so unguarded that he seemed to be playing his own personal game of H-O-R-R-Y.

“This is not some underdog team that somehow stumbled home and got lucky,” Harris said of Houston. “I know everyone has a lot of answers on how to beat the Houston Rockets, but where were you the last two years?”

His Lakers, who specialized in holding opponents under 100 points, were burned for triple figures in Games 3 and 4. The coach couldn’t figure why his shooters stopped shooting any more than why his rebounders started rebounding, but hope arrived when Anthony Peeler finally awakened with 4:57 to play, snapping the cords on a three-point shot, then nailing a jumper for two.

At that point, the Lakers were within five, 91-86, and when Ceballos stole the ball, Peeler let fire again. But he missed, and Elden Campbell missed a hook off the front of the rim, and then Ceballos went storming toward a dunk, only to be stuffed by Olajuwon and Horry. And Houston went back up by nine.

“That’s why this is Clutch City,” Ceballos said.

With pro basketball powers Los Angeles and Houston having precious little pro football to look forward to, this series took on an even greater importance. It went against the Lakers, for whom nothing was left but the sound of Harris’ voice, saying: “Any negative thing that I said about my guys, I wish I could strike them. Regardless of what anybody else thinks, this is a great bunch of guys.”