Lakers' time is short

[kris]

LOS ANGELES -- They've had three days to work things out, look things over. They've seen more film than Roger Ebert -- and some of it has been, most definitely, thumbs-down material.

This was not supposed to be the Lakers' Last Stand, but it most assuredly is. The presumptive NBA champions for this season enter this afternoon's game against the defending NBA champion Spurs trailing, 2-0, in their Western Conference semifinal. It goes without saying that they'd better win today or the crepe hangers will be lining up outside Staples Center Tuesday night for Game 4.

At times in this series, the Lakers have looked old. At times, they've looked discombobulated. They've sniped at each other on the bench. They've put together maybe two decent quarters out of eight. They have yet to find a way to stop the darts of Tony Parker, who has abused supposed Hall of Famer Gary Payton to the point of cruelty. Kobe Bryant has had long listless stages and Shaquille O'Neal has been active mainly when he's gotten the ball when and where he wants it.

The Lakers have committed 38 turnovers in the two games, including an astounding 11 in the fourth quarter of the opener. They've allowed Tim Duncan, Parker, Manu Ginobili, and Rasho Nesterovic to all shoot better than 50 percent from the field. (Watching Nesterovic at the line, however, is another painful story.) In Game 2, the Spurs outscored the lead-footed Lakers, 18-4, on the break, turning Showtime into Slowtime.

Will any or all of that change simply because of the venue? Shaq hopes so.

"This is going to be a different team," he growled to reporters. "We're at home now. We have to take care of business at home. Plain and simple. They're a good team. We're a good team."

Right now, the Spurs are clearly the superior team. Only seven teams in NBA history have blown 2-0 leads in best-of-seven series, and San Antonio does not look like it plans to be the eighth. (Then again, a good guess is that neither did the previous seven.) Yet last year, the Spurs went into LA with a similar 2-0 lead and left a few days later with the series knotted at 2-2.

But that was then and this is now. As Spurs coach Gregg Popovich noted, "Different year. Different teams."

The Lakers are a vastly different team from last year, constructed over the summer to return the Larry O'Brien Trophy to Los Angeles with the additions of Payton and Karl Malone. It hasn't quite gone as planned -- and this series has been especially telling.

Bryant is shooting 39.5 percent from the field and has hoisted a Walkerian 43 shots in two games to produce 46 points. He's an unKobe-like 4 of 11 in the two fourth quarters. Shaq's father put himself in the middle of the LA maelstrom by ripping Bryant in the San Antonio papers between Games 1 and 2. But Shaq has had his woes as well, from lackluster defensive play to missing 15 of 20 free throws (although at times he looks like Mark Price compared with Nesterovic). Payton has managed 11 points in two games while whining about the triangle offense, which emphasizes ball movement and not the solo post-ups he prefers. Malone had an awful Game 1 and a decent Game 2, but cannot guard Duncan the way he used to.

And the Lakers just happen to be playing an ultra-hot, ultra-confident team. The Spurs are on a numbing 17-game winning streak, having not lost in more than six weeks. The last time they passed through here, they ended the Lakers' 11-game winning streak. Parker has outscored Payton, 50-11, in the first two games, has 14 assists to Payton's 5, and has 2 turnovers to Payton's 4. They eliminated the Lakers last year and are not remotely intimidated by them.

LA coach Phil Jackson, whose contract is up at the end of the season, has been in this hole before and lived to tell about it. En route to winning the 1993 NBA championship, the Chicago Bulls dropped the first two games of the Eastern Conference finals to the Knicks. Chicago rallied to win the next four and then defeated the Suns in the NBA Finals.

No team has extricated itself from a 2-0 hole in a best-of-seven series since the 1995 Rockets, who did so against the Suns en route to their second consecutive championship. Only once in Jackson's tenure in LA has a Lakers team lost even the first game of a playoff series and then gone on to win the series: the 2001 NBA Finals against the 76ers.

In all probability, the Lakers have an excellent idea of what they've done -- and what they need to do. They just haven't been able to do it in the first two games -- and time is not on their side.