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LOS ANGELES: Coach Phil Jackson took one look at the Los Angeles
Lakers and decided to call off practice on Friday, figuring his
players needed to deal with their grief more than work on their
skills.
In the most memorable collapse in National
Basketball Association finals history, the Lakers choked away a
24-point lead in a 97-91 loss to Boston that gave the Celtics a 3-1
lead in the best-of-7 series.
“As a team, they had their heart ripped out.
It’s tough to recover from that, but they will,” Jackson said.
“This thing is not over, and we want to force the action, want to
continue to force the play.”
No team has recovered from the 3-1 deficit to
win the NBA finals, but the Lakers will try to bounce back in Game 5
here on Sunday.
It was hard to see how one less practice could
make the Lakers any worse than they played in the second half
Thursday.
“Just in the checking out how the guys were
and how they felt, I just felt it was a good idea,” Jackson said
of sending his players home early.
“We have to two days to work on things we need
to work on. We have guys that are well-conditioned at this time. We
need rest and recuperation in this situation, probably more
psychologically than we do physically.”
Jackson said no lineup changes were planned but
added, “We’re likely to pull out everything as this series goes
along.”
If it goes past Sunday, it will be only because
the Lakers play as they did in the first half, when they jumped
ahead 58-40 despite the fact NBA Most Valuable Player Kobe Bryant
did not hit a shot from the field.
“Kobe didn’t score the first half and we had
an 18-point lead,” Jackson said. “We wanted to reiterate that,
that we can still win this if we play the way we did the first half.
That’s important for us as a team to understand.”
The Lakers led 35-14 after the first quarter,
keeping the Celtics just one point off the finals’ record low
point total for the period, and were ahead 70-50 with 18 minutes
remaining.
“If they can get that kind of a lead, they can
maintain that kind of a game if they really put their minds to
it,” Jackson said.
Jackson, who guided the Chicago Bulls to six NBA
titles and the Lakers to three more from 2000 through 2002, spent
some sleepless hours of his own wondering what he might have done to
avert Game 4’s disaster finish.
-- AFP
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