Another Tall Order: Disposing of Dallas Is Lakers’ Next Task

For the first time in a fortnight, the Lakers could go to the beach and leave all their 7-foot-4 worries behind.

“We had to make sure we purged the Utah series out of our minds,” said Coach Pat Riley, who gave his players the day off Sunday to forget the seven-game Jazz session that had threatened to end on a blue note until the Lakers decided to play their own song in Saturday’s 109-98 series-clinching win over Utah.

Magic Johnson wouldn’t leave the Forum until given assurances that the Lakers had seen the last of Mark Eaton in the NBA playoffs.

“They can’t trade him to Dallas, can they?” asked Johnson, who doesn’t want to run into any familiar monoliths tonight at the Forum, when the Lakers play the Mavericks tonight in Game 1 of the Western Conference finals, which is farther than Dallas has ever advanced in the postseason.

Eaton, to Johnson’s relief, has returned to the laboratory of whatever mad scientist created such a shot-blocking monster.

James Worthy wasn’t inclined to do too much celebrating, however. He must have heard Karl Malone in the Utah dressing room telling people that if the Lakers thought they were through with seven-game series, they had another thing coming. Namely, the Mavericks.

“Dallas is very similar to Utah except they don’t have a 7-4 player,” Worthy said.

The Mavericks’ center, James Donaldson, has some impressive dimensions of his own--he’s 7-2, 278--but the one-time Clipper would be the first to admit that while he and Eaton may have similar sneaker sizes, they leave far different tracks.

“Mark is a much better defensive player than I am,” Donaldson said. “He’s taller, wider and a better shot-blocker. He gave Kareem fits.”

But while Donaldson hardly cuts as imposing a figure for the Laker center--Abdul-Jabbar averaged 15.6 points a game and shot 61% in the regular season against the Mavericks--the Mavericks and Jazz share a common commitment to defense.

Dallas limited the opposition to a club-record low of 104.9 points a game, sixth-best in the NBA and more than four points stingier than the team’s previous record.

“In Utah, we played a team I consider one of the best defensive teams in the league,” Riley said. “So is Dallas.”

There may be a significant difference between the Jazz and Mavericks, however. While Utah may have been a lot of laughs when Coach Frank Layden had microphone in hand, it was a different story on the court: There, the Jazz players made it clear that they knew--and they knew the Lakers knew--that if they beat the Lakers, the tabernacle walls wouldn’t come tumbling down in shock.

The Mavericks, on the other hand, may need a little convincing. Like the Jazz, they lost four out of five regular-season meetings with the Lakers, winning only when Magic Johnson and Michael Cooper were out of the lineup--and even in that game, the Lakers ran off 16 straight points in the fourth quarter in a comeback that fell just short.

But two of Dallas’ losses especially hurt. The first one came in March, when the Lakers shrugged off the Mavericks’ 11-game winning streak and blasted them on their home court on national TV, and the one in the last week of the regular season, when the Mavericks were still jockeying for home-court playoff advantage with Denver, and the Lakers, without James Worthy and despite having played the night before in San Antonio, manhandled them again.

It was after that game that Donaldson publicly acknowledged that the Mavericks simply weren’t as good as the Lakers and couldn’t beat them.

Sound like the sharp side of a psychological edge? Riley wasn’t buying it.

“If it’s embedded in there, fine,” Riley said. “That’s one of the things you try to accomplish in the regular season. But I don’t think that’s going to make that much difference, now.”

Donaldson, perhaps bolstered by Dallas’ early-round conquests of Houston and Denver, backed off on his earlier statement when the team arrived here Sunday night.

“Each game is different,” he said. “I think we’ll utilize some of the things we saw in the Utah series. We’re an excellent defensive team, too.”

According to Roy Tarpley, they’re a better team, period, than the one the Lakers last saw. Tarpley was once the 7-footer of Jerry Buss’ dreams--the Laker owner considered trading James Worthy for Mark Aguirre and the rights to Tarpley. But now he appears destined to be the player around whom Dallas will build, supplanting Aguirre, the streak-shooting scorer who recently was called a “mental case” on national television by CBS-TV’s Billy Packer.

Tarpley, whose prowess as a scorer and rebounder earned him recognition as the best sixth man in the league, said: “We’re playing more together as a team now. We’re moving (the ball) better, we’re shooting it better, we’re blocking our men out better, we’re doing a lot of things better now than we were then.”

While it appears that Coach John MacLeod’s solution to the on-going battles between Aguirre and the previous Dallas coach, Dick Motta, is to simply stop relying on Aguirre the way the Mavericks used to, Riley still believes Magic Johnson’s close friend is the Lakers’ most dangerous foe.

Aguirre may be spending great stretches of time on the bench, but Riley points to the damage the Dallas forward wrought in Game 3 of the Houston series, when he scored 27 points in the third quarter alone after being written off as a has-been.

“The keys to defending the Mavericks are still containing Aguirre first, (Rolando) Blackman second, and the new force, because of his athletic ability and hustle, Tarpley,” Riley said. “Maybe Aguirre’s not going to be there to score 35 every night, but he still was the 8th leading scorer in the league this season.”