Lakers make Spurs look vulnerable

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SAN ANTONIO -- Part of the local charm here, if you want to call it that, is the tenor-voiced announcer at the AT& T Center who likes to fire up the crowd by shouting, "Here come the Spurs!" Well, there go the Spurs. The young-gun Lakers went through another growth spurt Tuesday night, leading from start to finish on defending champion San Antonio's home floor, even surviving a late scare to take a commanding 3-1 lead in the Western Conference finals. "We're going to learn how to be champions as we're doing it," said Lakers point guard Derek Fisher. Indeed. Needing to establish command of the game early, to put the desperate Spurs on their heels, the Lakers did it. Needing to shut down the man around whom the Spurs revolve, Manu Ginobili, the Lakers did it. Needing a bounce back effort on the offensive end from Lamar Odom, who was lost in Game 3, they got it -- at least when they needed it. He saved his best for last, scoring eight of his 16 points in the fourth quarter to keep his team just out of reach of the faltering Spurs. The 93-91 win may have been sloppy at the end for the Lakers, but who cares? For the first 59 minutes, they did what they had to do. Mostly they made the Spurs look nervous, vulnerable and tentative. This isn't San Antonio falling apart. It's a better Lakers team pulling away in a series it should clinch on its home floor Thursday night. "It's very important that we come out and play a similar type game that we played tonight," said Lakers coach Phil Jackson, looking ahead to Game 5. "With the kind of energy we had, and board and rebounding and ball possession. That will win the game for us." In truth, the Lakers look like they can beat San Antonio any which way now. All three wins have been from a different mold. They won Game 1 with a monstrous come-from-behind rally. Game 2 was a stunningly easy blowout. Game 4 was a controlled, one-step-ahead-of-the-posse job. "There's no script," said Fisher. "There's no specific way we have to win games." In a game that most of the pre-game talking-heads had ceded to the Spurs -- since the Spurs have been so good at winning when they had to -- it was the Lakers who added another notch to their postseason belts, ending San Antonio's 13-game, home-floor, playoffs winning streak. You got the feeling the Lakers should have been up by a gazillion at halftime. Ginobili, who had reappeared in Game 3 like a Roman candle, fizzled just as quickly in Game 4. The Lakers denied him the ball early, keeping him from heating up like he had on Sunday. "We wanted to stay attached to him as much as possible and not give him any open looks," said Kobe Bryant of the switching defenses on Ginobili. These days, the coaches say it, the Lakers do it. Ginobili, the Argentinian spark plug, has been the key to the Spurs success, but he had nothing on Tuesday, scoring the same number of points in the first half as Diego Maradona, who had four fewer shots. Ginobili finished with seven points, and had to be picked up by reserve Brent Barry, who had the playoff game of his life with 23 points. But the Spurs live and die with Ginobili, not with Barry, and they are down to their last gasp. The Lakers, not much of a rebounding team in this postseason, totally dominated San Antonio on the boards, especially on the offensive end. The Spurs couldn't retrieve a newspaper from a driveway in the first half, and gave up 20 second-chance points before intermission. Yet, the Lakers were up only 53-47 because the Spurs converted all 17 shots from the free throw line. Anyone who thought the Spurs had a second-half surprise for the Lakers got their own surprise. The Spurs tied the game twice in the third quarter, but the Lakers made like a triple-wide motor home on a country road. Nothing was going to get past them. Three times in the fourth quarter the Spurs got within two points, but twice Bryant nailed jumpers, and once Odom dunked on a pass from Pau Gasol to give the Lakers an adequate cushion. "It was a two-point game when I checked back in," said Bryant. "I knew I had to get something going, knock down some shots, get us some breathing room." He thinks it, he does it. And the way things are going for the toppling Spurs, four-point deficits down the stretch are looking like oceans to cross. You can only imagine what the 3-1 deficit in games looks like.(Contact Gregg Patton at gpatton@PE.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)