SAN ANTONIO VS. LOS ANGELES PHILADELPHIA VS. MILWAUKEE

Wednesday, May 30 No more excuses: Lakers simply a beast By Mark Kreidler Special to ESPN.com The great thing about elitism is that you can bend the rules any way that suits you, so long as it propagates whatever position you're taking. Or, to put it another way, if the Los Angeles Lakers go ahead and run the table in these playoffs, you can bet the farm there's going to be a torrent of mythologizing that would make Paul Bunyan and Babe blush like kinder-cares in a potty-break accident. Phil Jackson has had few reasons to scratch his head during this postseason. And, as usual, we're getting ahead of ourselves. But that's the Lakers in a nutshell right now, isn't it -- forcing conversations that would've been deemed ludicrous only 10 days ago? First things first: You no longer have to be sniffing paint to argue that L.A. could go 15-0 in this NBA postseason. It isn't your pizza dream talking. After Monday night's second straight dispatch of proud San Antonio at the Alamo-a-bob, the Lakers are 2-0 in the best-of-seven series and in prime position to win the Western Conference without so much as surrendering a game. At that point, of course, all bets are off. The Lakers would have come out of the West in a year in which the conference was widely judged as almost embarrassingly deeper and more competitive than the Eastern Conference (verdict: not necessarily, but you can't argue with hype), and they would have come out in staggeringly superior fashion. And if the Lakers then went on to blow straight through the NBA Finals (no disrespect to The Answer), what then? What, you ask? Only the biggest wave of revisionist opinionating since Milli Vanilli got caught with its overdubs down, that's all. The whole Shaq-Kobe thing would move from Wallace-Pippen to Jordan-Pippen, from fractious and uneasy to beautifully symmetrical. Phil Jackson wouldn't be the guy so frustrated by Bryant that he took to the press in midseason to politely rip the player's Kobe-centric nature; he would revert to Zen master status, the wily orchestrator who allowed his star Lakers to slowly work their ways back toward each other. And the Lakers as a team would go from the slightly underachieving and unquestionably uninspired bunch that slogged through whole chunks of the season to ... to what, exactly? To Showtime? To the Bird-McHale-Parish-era Celtics? Snakes alive, to the Jordan-Pippen Bulls? It's all possible now, because it is all real. The L.A. Lakers really have won 17 straight games, including nine straight in the playoffs. They haven't been home in nearly two weeks and still didn't lose a game -- won two straight in Sacramento to close out the Kings, and then this Godzilla of a thing in San Antonio. The qualifiers are beginning to melt away, and that's the thing. When the Lakers swept self-detonating Portland in the first round, any sentient NBA-watcher immediately replied, Well, yeah. When L.A. took out the Kings in four straight in the second round, the talk centered more on Sacramento's inability to do anything with O'Neal in the pivot -- and on Chris Webber's uncertain future -- than it did with the Lakers per se. But taking out the Spurs, that's something else again -- and even there, the qualifier exists in the form of Derek Anderson sitting in street clothes, one of San Antonio's most effective weapons against the Lakers silenced by the Juwan Howard hit during the Spurs-Mavericks series. If you're paying attention, that is, it's always something. It is the Blazers' ineptitude or the Kings' weak spots or the Spurs' key injury. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but are we missing any other handy means of just selling the Lakers completely short? At some point the vox populi is going to have to confront the notion that, whatever the Lakers were for most of the 82-game season, they aren't that now. It's a different beast out there now. You can certainly argue that timing is everything, but that's not an insult, is it, that a talented but erratic team pulls itself together in the moment when togetherness is most desperately needed? The Jordan-era Bulls were mostly considered to be two stars, a coach and some other guys in uniforms, and only if you weren't watching would you accept that as a working premise. If you were watching, you certainly knew that Jordan and Pippen were at the heart of things -- but you also knew about the Steve Kerrs and the Dennis Rodmans and the John Paxsons and the Ron Harpers, on and on. The Lakers? It's Shaq and Kobe and Phil, of course, but also Derek Fisher and Robert Horry and Rick Fox and, heavens, Horace Grant -- and beyond that the comparison gets dicey, because of what the Bulls accomplished and what the Lakers haven't yet accomplished. That much is fair. So is this: If the Lakers run the table, it's going to be time for some serious reconsideration, if not outright mythmaking. Don't say you weren't warned. Mark Kreidler is a columnist for the Sacramento Bee, which has a Web site at http://www.sacbee.com/. Send this story to a friend | Most sent stories

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