ShareThisThe Lakers put their uniforms on and played a basketball game Sunday, but if they have a killer instinct, it took an earlier plane home to Los Angeles.
This wasn't their proudest moment, Game 4 at the Toyota Center, a humbling, lopsided loss to Houston and their worst performance in a postseason game since the painful, embarrassing end to the 2008 season in Boston 11 months ago.
The Rockets' most recognizable star, 7-6 center Yao Ming, was sitting at the end of the bench in street clothes, morose with a broken foot. With the Lakers staring at a possible 3-1 advantage in the seven-game series, complacency settled over them like a warm, puffy comforter.
Series tied, 2-2.
"We came to Houston to get the home court back, and we did that," said Lakers coach Phil Jackson, making a rather hollow-sounding reference to the Game 3 win Friday.
That victory may have made up for their Game 1 loss at home, but the Lakers didn't press the issue as they should have. Instead, they used Friday's road win like a big cushion to catch Sunday's pratfall.
When informed that his coach wasn't happy with the effort but took comfort in the split in Houston, guard Derek Fisher shook his head.
"We got what we wanted, but that's the wrong way (to look at it)," Fisher said. "That's like (saying) today's result didn't matter for us."
It was hard to tell that it did.
Lakers forward Trevor Ariza pointed out that teams that lose a star often compensate with energy-boosting desperation, and the Rockets benefited by a hot-shooting start. Ariza also conceded the obvious.
"We didn't play as hard as they did," he said.
While Houston rose to the immense challenge of winning without Yao, the Lakers sank like pebbles in a pond.
"We didn't come out with the sense of urgency that I would have liked," said Kobe Bryant, calmly understating the obvious.
It pretty much wasn't the urgency that anyone whoever flew a Lakers flag from his car window would have liked, either.
The Rockets scored the first nine points, led 19-4, and 29-16 after the first quarter. The home team led by 18 at halftime and never had to deal with a threatening run.
The defining moment came at the end of the third quarter, with seven-tenths of a second left and the Rockets putting the ball in play 60 feet from the basket. Ron Artest threw a baseball pass over five Lakers' heads to streaking guard Aaron Brooks, who sprung his 6-foot body in the air underneath the basket, caught the ball and softly banked in a shot as the buzzer sounded.
That gave Houston their biggest lead, 83-54, and one more reason for their sellout crowd to explode. The Rockets faithful couldn't have expected much, with the Yao news leveling whatever postseason expectations they had. Lots of seats in the lower bowl were empty at tipoff Sunday, but somehow filled up in direct proportion to the growth of the Rockets' lead.
The best-case scenario for the Lakers is that down the road, no one will think to bring up this 99-87 defeat -- a final margin that was as irrelevant as the Lakers' 33-16 fourth-quarter edge and as meaningless as the 18 points Pau Gasol finally dropped on guys-not-named-Yao guarding him in the final 12 minutes.
"Championship teams I've been on, we've had to go through some things, games that were tough," Fisher said. "You don't go back through every series and look at the games you lost."
They've sure got one to forget now.
(Contact Gregg Patton at gpatton@PE.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
columnMust credit The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif.
