All in All, a Lousy Sun Set

Penny Hardaway had a wide open 12-foot jump shot but shot the ball 11 feet.

Jason Kidd dribbled the ball out of bounds without any defensive pressure from a Laker.

Rodney Rogers threw a lead pass to Kidd that went straight into the courtside seats.

To put it politely, Tuesday was not the Phoenix Suns’ night as they were crushed by the Lakers, 87-65, to close out their best-of-seven series in five games.

The Suns were bad. Real bad. Not only did they tie an NBA playoff record for fewest points in a half with 23 in the first two quarters, they were almost as bad in the second half.

Who did they think they were, the Clippers?

“There really isn’t too much to say,” Phoenix center Luc Longley said. “It’s hard to know what happened. We couldn’t knock down any shots as a team. When you look at it, we got good shots and they didn’t really score a ton of points.

“We turned the ball and couldn’t knock down shots. Our defense, I believe wasn’t too bad. It was our offense. . . . You hate to say it was one of those nights, but what other way can you look at it.”

This came after the Suns routed the Lakers, 117-98, Sunday in a game that included a 38-point first quarter.

“It was like our first game of the season,” rookie forward Shawn Marion said. “We didn’t do too many things right.”

The second quarter was a nightmare for the Suns. After a not-so-bad first--they only down, 21-14--the Suns were horrible in the second. They couldn’t have shot the ball into the dark at midnight from the Staples Center roof.

“We were too much in a hurry to run our offense, we couldn’t take care of the ball,” Marion said.

“Maybe too much anxiety was built up for the game. We weren’t ready to play.”

The Suns realized things were going to be rough when Cliff Robinson, who had been playing well, had to leave the game with 9:00 minutes left in the first half because he picked up his third foul.

Without Robinson, the only Sun who seemed into the flow of the game in the first quarter, Phoenix was lost on offense. If a Sun wasn’t missing a jump shot from the perimeter, a Laker was blocking a Sun layup or dunk inside.

The second quarter box score for Phoenix looked a lot like Paul Allen’s bank account: lots of zeroes. They shot 11.8% in the quarter.

Kidd missed all four of his attempts. Corie Blount, Marion and Hardaway missed both of their attempts. Only Kevin Johnson and Rogers scored baskets.

At halftime, the Suns couldn’t wait to get back and start the third quarter. No way did they figure they could play that bad again.

“It wasn’t tough to come out, we wanted to get out the locker room fast . . . we didn’t think that was us out there,” Longley said. “But we didn’t do it. We proved ourselves [wrong].”

The Suns can now look ahead to next season and maybe Hardaway said it best: “We are a team that is going to get better. We learned a lot from this series.”

They better and if they forget, they can always check the NBA record book.