ShareThisIt took only one night for the Lakers to find out an important truth about Houston.
The postseason Rockets aren't the regular-season Rockets.
Los Angeles went unbeaten in four games against Houston the last six months. Now, when it counts, in the postseason, the Rockets are the unbeaten ones, stunning the Lakers on their home floor Monday night, 100-92, in the opener of their second-round NBA playoff series.
Someone asked Lakers guard Shannon Brown how the team would deal with the "shock factor" of dropping Game 1.
"There's no shock factor," said Brown. "You just have to bounce back."
If the Lakers weren't shocked, I'm willing to bet most of their fans were. Most "guess-timators," including this one, saw this as a quick Lakers victory, no more than a five-game exercise.
Now it's at least five games. That, of course, assumes the Lakers are still going to win, and that's with the Lakers' home-floor advantage suddenly gone.
Stealing Game 1 is exactly what the Rockets did to Portland in the first round, and look what happened to the Trail Blazers. Apparently that wasn't enough of a wake up call for any of us, including the Lakers.
"I didn't like the start of the game at all," said their coach, Phil Jackson. "There wasn't much control or poise. We were not executing the offense."
What's hard for anyone to get used to, it seems, is that the Rockets without their scoring star, Tracy McGrady, are a better team.
Before this series even started, Houston coach Rick Adelman described his team as a bunch of scramblers who had to make up for McGrady's loss -- and overachieved in the process.
"We had to go to eight or nine guys," said Adelman. "(McGrady) was our focal point. What we found out was that we had a group that played their tails off every day."
The Rockets still had old-guard names like center Yao Ming, and forwards Ron Artest and Shane Battier, but they needed more to survive in the Western Conference.
Relying on younger players -- such as second-year point guard Aaron Brooks, the explosive gnat from Oregon; second-year forward Carl Landry; and third-year guard Kyle Lowry -- can go one way or the other. For Adelman, it was a pleasant surprise.
"Young guys -- you don't know how they'll do," said Adelman. "But every night I know we'll get an effort for 48 minutes. We might not play well, but we'll get an effort."
They definitely got it Monday, attacking the Lakers from the start. But the fact that the Rockets never mounted a big lead may have lulled the Lakers to sleep.
There was no urgency, until the closing minutes, when suddenly the hard-workers from Texas were up by two, three and four possessions.
Too late.
Who, exactly, on the Rockets could do that kind of damage to the Lakers?
Well, there was Yao with 28 points, Artest with 21 (and seven assists) and Brooks with 19 -- the most important statistic being that each of those top three scorers made at least half their shots, a sign that there was not a lot of tough defense.
"We didn't communicate on defense," said Lakers forward Pau Gasol, who shared defensive duty on Yao with Andrew Bynum. "That's why they had open jumpers and layups."
Gasol didn't seem overly concerned, agreeing with Jackson that the Lakers played poorly, and believing the Lakers will bounce back.
"We weren't sharp," he said. "We didn't knock down our shots and weren't as good defensively as we need to be.
"We'll just have to play harder than them and better than them."
Considering the discrepancy in talent -- the Lakers have more -- playing better should be easy for the Lakers.
Considering the newfound makeup of the Rockets, playing harder than them will be the challenge.
(Contact Gregg Patton at gpatton@PE.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
columnMust credit The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif.
