Shaq Leaves Them Hurting and Complaining

In case Chris Dudley, the Yalie who must try to single-cover Shaquille O’Neal, needed an omen more trouble was coming, there was the guy at the Carson gym where the Blazers practiced Saturday who yelled at him:

“The only chance you’ve got is if it turns into a spelling bee in the fourth quarter!”

However, since Dudley is presented with a 7-foot, 320-pound fact, or faq, named Shaq every game, he didn’t need omens, just reinforcements.

Anyone got a nimble Grizzly bear they can spare?

Unlike Friday, when the other Blazers forgot they were supposed to help centers Dudley and Arvydas Sabonis, and O’Neal went for 46 points, everyone piled into Sunday’s battle in the pivot. Of course, since the helpers were smaller than Shaq, it was like watching Lilliputians go for a ride on Gulliver’s shoulders.

The other Lakers, held to 49 points in Game 1, stepped it up to 77 Sunday. Meanwhile, O’Neal got another 30. At this point in the series, you could say the Blazers’ defensive game plan is still . . . evolving.

OK, how about this wrinkle: Shaq cheats?

As if on cue, Blazers began complaining afterward that the referees have been allowing O’Neal to throw innocent defenders--them--around.

“These guys are great officials,” said Coach P.J. Carlesimo, “and they’re doing the best they can, but he’s very, very hard to defend when he can throw you on those diagonal screens. He’s a great player. He doesn’t need any kind of edge.”

Said Dudley: “How many offensive foul calls were called tonight? Probably none [O’Neal got one, actually] and I think you could call an offensive foul every time just about down there.

“It’s tough. Not to take anything away from him, he’s a tremendous player, a great player, one of the best players in the league, but it’s real tough to guard him when someone’s that big and is allowed to just lower his shoulder and go to the middle.”

Not that everyone saw it that way. O’Neal’s agent, Leonard Armato, sitting on the southern baseline, counted 10 times his client was “brutalized” as he shot the ball, without getting a call. That was by halftime.

“I think,” said Dudley, grinning, “we have the opposite perspective.”

Of course, this was standard playoff fare, the losing team complaining as a tactic, working the Game 3 referees through the newspapers from the moment they get off their plane in Portland.

The Blazers need help. They beat the Lakers, 3-1, in the season series, in large part because they had two centers big enough to do what so few others dared, single-cover O’Neal.

O’Neal blew that strategy to bits in Game 1, even if Laker Coach Del Harris had to slow the contest down into the NBA’s version of trench warfare to make his point.

Not that the Blazers were convinced.

“A lot of teams will tell their outside defenders, as soon as the ball is thrown into a post player, run down there and double-team,” Blazer assistant coach Dick Harter said before Sunday’s game. “Whereas we’re saying, as soon as the outside defender gets to a certain place on the floor, then we want you to come.

“Well, the other night, it looked like we saw it but we just didn’t react to it.”

Smiling, he added: “Maybe the huge size of the battering ram scared us out of coming there.”

Harter is an advocate of manly, one-on-one defense of such note, he even converted the not-very-convertible Pat Riley. Riley trapped and double-teamed with the Lakers but, almost from the moment he hired Harter with the Knicks in 1991, it was one-on-one forever.

Of course, the best-laid plans of mice and men are as nothing when a huge, enraged, Superman wannabe like O’Neal feels like scattering them, as he did Sunday.

Sometimes, no help arrived and O’Neal scored. Sometimes help came too late and O’Neal scored. Sometimes help arrived in time and O’Neal scored.

Sometimes help came early and O’Neal passed. On top of everything else, he had five assists.

“No one’s really that big and that aggressive, just goes in like that,” said Dudley. “He really just gets the ball and goes bang, bang and goes into you and either it’s a foul or he’s dunking. It’s tough. It’s real tough.

“Patrick [Ewing] is more of a pure post player. David Robinson’s obviously more of an athletic, graceful--same with Hakeem [Olajuwon]. There’s nobody like that.”

As they say in the rest of the league, thank heaven for that.

As to the matter of who is mistreating whom, it’s a debate as old as the annals of post play in the NBA, like picking out the aggressor in a mud-wrestling match.

If defenders weren’t allowed to push, hold and/or grapple, they wouldn’t have a prayer of keeping O’Neal far enough from the hoop to have a contest.

O’Neal does, indeed, use his body for leverage, which is close to, but not quite the same as “running people over” or “throwing people out of the way.” If running people over was all there was to it, if size and strength were enough, Mark Eaton would have averaged in double figures in this league.

Anyway, if there’s one thing we learned from the Blazers after Game 2, it was that guarding O’Neal is tough.

Of course, everyone already knew that, as they know it’s not likely to get much easier.