Sloan Simply the Best at Playing It Straight

SALT LAKE CITY — Considering that his two star players have been around since Shaquille O’Neal was a mere 6-footer and that one of them sat out the first 18 games of the season and that the Utah Jazz still won 62 games, Jerry Sloan, not Larry Bird, should have been named the NBA’s coach of the year.

But if anyone among the 19,911 fans at the Jazz-Laker game Saturday went to the Delta Center expecting to see Jerry the Legend pull Xs and O’s out of a hat, they might as well have been watching some guy coaching a pickup game at the YMCA.

According to one of the local newspapers, three rocket scientists from the Thiokol Propulsion Group in Ogden, Utah, theorized the Jazz would prevail in this best-of-seven series based on the “derivative of the quadratic equation, a range-trajectory analysis of each team’s shot selection and an evaluation of total energy conversion.”

I doubt Sloan read it. His pregame chalk talk consisted basically of: “Stockton’s on Fisher, Hornacek’s on Jones, Russell’s on Fox, Malone’s on Horry, Foster’s on Shaq, go team!”

Who couldn’t have thought of that?

Well, Mike Dunleavy and George Karl to name two. In the Lakers’ two previous playoff series, Portland and Seattle double-, triple- and even quadruple-teamed the Lakers’ center in a bold attempt to contain his scoring. Not only did they fail to do that, they turned him into Magic Johnson as an assist man.

Sloan decided the Jazz would take Shaq straight up.

What’s O’Neal going to do, Sloan asked after practice Friday, score 100?

Wilt Chamberlain once did. He’s the center O’Neal has been most often compared to since averaging almost 30 points against the Trail Blazers and SuperSonics.

But if O’Neal was The Dipper on Saturday, it was the little one.

He finished 81 points short of 100, missing 10 of 16 shots from the field and nine of 16 from the free-throw line. It gets worse. He also had seven turnovers and no assists as the Lakers were pummeled, 112-77.

It was O’Neal’s worst playoff performance since the first game at Utah last season, when, not coincidentally, the Lakers also were held to 77 points in a 16-point loss.

After that game, he said he would prove to the world that Greg Ostertag couldn’t handle him. As ambitions go, it wasn’t exactly shooting for the moon.

Of course, Ostertag has never said he could handle O’Neal.

Neither has Foster, who shared that responsibility Saturday with Ostertag and Antoine Carr as part of Sloan’s strategy to constantly bump up against O’Neal with a big, fresh body. The Jazz occasionally collapsed on the Laker center but only after cutting off the passing lanes to assure that he didn’t throw the ball back out to the perimeter for open shots by Eddie Jones or Nick Van Exel.

Foster is the player who added fuel to the Laker-Jazz feud during a regular-season game here in March by dunking at the end of a fastbreak and then slashing his finger across his throat to indicate that the Lakers were done.

The Lakers didn’t forget, but, to make sure, Coach Del Harris included the sequence in films he prepared for his players last week.

After concluding a fastbreak in a similar fashion Saturday, Foster turned to the Laker bench and placed his index finger on his lips as if to say, “Shhhh.”

“I was telling them, ‘I’m not going to make any trouble,’ ” Foster said later. “I’m going to be a good boy and keep my mouth shut.”

True to his word, he had only complimentary things to say about O’Neal.

“I didn’t go out there thinking I was going to stop the guy,” Foster said. “You can’t. For the most part, he just missed some shots he normally makes.”

Harris agreed.

“I think he rushed himself early,” the Laker coach said. “We have been playing teams that have been going to him [with the double team] before the pass. This is a different timing for him than we have seen in a while, and he didn’t adjust real well.”

O’Neal didn’t accept all the blame, but as much of it as he was due.

“The whole team played bad, including myself,” he said. “For me, it was just one of those days.”

O’Neal vowed that Monday night will be different, although it was difficult to tell whether he was talking about Game 2 or some rumble he has planned for afterward.

Apparently trying to rile himself out of his funk, O’Neal focused not on Foster, Ostertag or Carr but on Stockton and Malone, who were among the players called upon to double-team him from time to time but otherwise appeared to pose no threat to him.

“If a couple of Hall of Famers get caught with my elbows, they get caught,” he said. “We see now how the game is going to be played. If they throw elbows, we’ll throw them. They’ll have to watch out next game for their noses and stuff.”

In a more lucid moment, O’Neal admitted there’s another tactic that might be effective when he’s one-on-one against the centers known collectively as Foster-Dawg-Tag, before the double teams arrive.

“I’ve got to make my move to the hoop quicker,” he said.

Van Exel said that’s a good idea.

“If they’re going to play him that way, he’s got to dominate down low,” Van Exel said.

Shaq, dominate. That sounds like something Harris should tell his center before Monday night’s game. It’s not rocket science.