It’s Lakers Who Have the Problem

Road kill, even at home.

The Lakers on Friday night played their first game at the Forum since Feb. 23, if that’s what you want to call it. They scored 33 points in the first half, they shot 12.5%--that’s right, 12.5%--in the second quarter, they got booed loudly on a couple occasions, and they got crushed by Houston, 111-90, a defeat that dropped them into fourth place in the West.

The romp was actually a double victory for the Rockets, who not only jumped ahead to third in the conference, but won the season series, 3-1, and with it the tiebreaker should the teams finish even in the standings.

“This was a tough one,” Nick Van Exel said after the Lakers’ third-biggest loss of the season, also their seventh defeat in the last 10 games. “It’s Houston, it’s a big game, and we’re down by 30 in the first half and the crowd is booing us. It’s tough to lose like that.”

On the other hand, it could have been worse. The Rockets led by 29 early in the third quarter and 25 midway through the fourth before turning things over to the bench. Only one Houston starter played significant minutes, Hakeem Olajuwon going 37 and getting 23 points, 12 rebounds and five blocks.

Not that there was any such thing as a right combination for the Lakers on this night, but Jerome Kersey was back as the starting small forward, one game after George McCloud got the call there. Temporary is a permanent state in most cases in the Del Harris rotation.

The only thing for sure of late, especially along the front line, has been the rise in prominence of Corie Blount, from at or near the end of the bench about 10 days ago to the first big man off the bench. Friday marked his second consecutive game in that role.

“That’s the good thing about the way I do it,” Harris said of Blount’s having played well a week earlier at Atlanta and then turning it into new life. “I give people an opportunity. I don’t say, ‘I have a set rotation, so you three are not going to play.’

“What I like about his game is, right now he’s going out and doing the two things we need him to do--defend and rebound. The offense kind of comes to him from there.”

Said Blount, who went into the Rocket game having averaged eight points and 8.3 rebounds in only 23.3 minutes against the Hawks, Pacers and Mavericks at the end of the just-completed trip: “I’m just going out and playing. That was my problem before. I was so worried about messing up that I wasn’t playing relaxed, like I needed to.”

He, and all the Lakers, got the benefit Friday of not having to deal with Charles Barkley, as if what remained of the Rockets wasn’t trouble enough. This was the game in which Barkley had hoped to return after sitting out the previous two because of a bruise and deep cut on his left hip from a collision with Dallas’ Shawn Bradley, but that never came close to happening. The most action Barkley got was riding a stationary bicycle and he even called that a struggle, just before ruling himself out for the next two games.

His team, meanwhile, inflicted other forms of pain, needing barely more than 8 1/2 minutes to build a 15-point lead and then pushing that to 31 in the second quarter, a second quarter in which L.A. made two of 16 shots and scored 12 points. Every healthy Rocket had played before halftime except one.

The Sedale Threatt homecoming almost had to come without any actual participation. Back at the Forum, where he spent the previous five seasons as a valuable Laker before being renounced last summer in the move for salary cap room, he stayed on the bench until 4:55 remained in the fourth quarter, by which time Houston’s lead was 98-76.

Threatt received a nice ovation from what remained of the sellout crowd. He was pudgy and was showing a new eight-inch scar on the right knee, the result of surgery in November to correct a torn tendon suffered during the two months in France he would rather forget, but at least he was back in the NBA.

“I got hurt, and they started talking French real quick,” he said.

Like “get lost”?

“Pretty much.”

His time with the Rockets apparently will come in the same doses as Friday, at least until he gets in better shape. For now, they will go mostly with a pair of rookies down the stretch at point guard, Matt Maloney and Randy Livingston.