Game 7 Concerns Lakers, But It Delights Celtics

They want no part of Sunday's Game 7 in Southern California. It doesn't matter that the Lakers will be playing at home, where they just beat Houston by 40 points. A full red-alert panic has taken over Lakerland, from San Diego to Santa Barbara. It wasn't supposed to come to this, not against a Rockets team without its two best players. The Lakers, it said in the script issued at the start of the season, were the team to beat, the favorite to win it all. They were supposed to tear through the preliminaries and wait for LeBron and the Cavaliers in the Finals. The very necessity of a Game 7 suggests a giant Lakers failure, even though a victory would send them to the Western Conference finals.

Amazing by contrast is Boston, where the Celtics are overjoyed to be hosting their own Game 7 Sunday in the nightcap of a day-night NBA playoff doubleheader. The Celtics, in getting to a seventh game, seem downright admirable, having fought to a 3-3 draw with Dwight Howard and a seemingly physically superior Orlando Magic team. The possibility of reaching the Eastern Conference finals without Kevin Garnett and backup Leon Powe suggests a measure of playoff overachievement rarely associated with the Celtics. One more victory over Orlando and the Celtics' postseason will have been a success, no matter what happens against Cleveland.

The Lakers, in the absence of professional football in Los Angeles, are the franchise and there's no panic like Lakerland panic when the Lakers aren't living up to expectations, which they certainly have not in this postseason. Even one measly loss to the Utah Jazz in the first round was met with much civic angst because the Lakers fell into a relatively new habit of treating big leads casually, and settling for 10-point victories after leading by 20 or more. And now, in the past two games in Houston, the Lakers haven't led by anything, not a single point.

Derek Fisher, the veteran point guard, said after Game 5 of this series that "we're still learning how to play in the postseason at a really high level," and he pointed to the likes of young Andrew Bynum, Jordan Farmar and Sasha Vujacic as relative playoff neophytes. But nobody in Southern California seemed to be listening and Fisher understood that, too. "We're the more popular and easier target," he said. "We have the personalities, the individuals people recognize and pay attention to. . . . The expectation that you're supposed to discard an opponent because you're better than them on paper. I don't live in that world."

Ah, but everybody else in Hollywood seems to. The one and only Magic Johnson said the Lakers were an embarrassment to the franchise after a Game 4 blowout loss in Houston. Kenny Smith, the TNT analyst, on Thursday called the Lakers "arrogant" and said their arrogance leads to complacency, which is the reason they've been unable to close out the Rockets.

Part of what has enraged the locals nearly as much as the losing is what they perceive as the lack of outrage coming from the two most important Lakers: Kobe Bryant and Phil Jackson. The Los Angeles Times's veteran basketball columnist, Mark Heisler, wrote in Friday's editions, "The best Coach Phil Jackson, still looking for silver linings on this tornado that just popped up on the horizon, could come up with was, 'I'm looking forward to Sunday's game.' "

Bryant's specific reaction after losing Game 6: "You've just got to grind these things out. . . . We could be playing much better on a consistent basis."

That's pretty much it. The Lakers appear calm, cool and collected, except when they have to play defense, at which time they just seem disinterested.

So, the current scouting report on the Lakers: They're still soft around the basket defensively, and Bynum's return hasn't helped because he's nowhere near the player he was before his latest knee injury; the bench, especially when Lamar Odom is in the starting lineup, is a C-plus unit at best. Houston's Aaron Brooks is too fast for anybody in a Lakers uniform to guard, even Fisher, who's held his own in that regard for a dozen years . . . until the last week or so; Jackson hasn't been nearly as demanding as he was on the Shaq-Kobe Lakers, or the Michael Jordan Bulls. Los Angelenos want to hear somebody in the locker room calling out the Lakers the way Magic did last Sunday on TV. But it hasn't happened.

"Yes, there's a certain way you envision that you need to play to win a championship," Fisher said. "But it's totally impossible to stay at that level for all 200 days of the season, each and every one. You can't just bottle it up and carry it around with you. There are too many variables to presume you can do that."

Of course, it seems the Cavaliers and Nuggets have been able to bottle it and carry it around, at least through the first two rounds, which leads to even more examination of the Lakers. If LeBron can do this, why can't Kobe?

The only caution should be that Utah and Houston (the Lakers' first two opponents) are much tougher outs than Detroit and Atlanta (Cleveland's first two opponents). Still, Denver, after winning each of its first two series in five games, looks like it should be the favorite against the Lakers in the Western Conference finals.

Cleveland's lack of a challenge through two rounds might serve the Celtics well if Boston can wring one more clutch performance from Ray Allen, Paul Pierce and Rajon Rondo in Game 7 against Orlando, which is about the goofiest club at times. The Magic's players clearly have issues with their coach, Stan Van Gundy. They don't seem to know they ought to move heaven and earth to get the ball to Dwight Howard. And now, my man Patrick Ewing has done something he's simply no good at: issuing a guarantee. Ewing said Friday on radio to his former coach John Thompson, "Even though I'm not playing, I'm guaranteeing a win."

Ooooooooh.

The Celtics are 17-3 all-time at home in Game 7s. They're positively beaming that they're still alive, despite the injuries, and beating a team that looks better on paper. There's no chance that Orlando beats the Celtics in Boston in Game 7, is there?

The Lakers will beat Houston or face an uncomfortable offseason. The Celtics, despite Ewing's guarantee, will beat Orlando. An already dramatic postseason, mostly because of fouls and officiating and off-court theatrics, will put the tension back where it belongs Sunday: on the court, with the two most important franchises in the sport.