That Switch Now Appears to Be Broken

You know that day of reckoning for all those years of squabbling and sleeping until April, even as the Lakers won three consecutive titles?

It’s here.

The buzzards are doing slow circles over Staples Center. And it’s not only the Lakers’ season that’s in danger now, as they trail the San Antonio Spurs, 2-0, but the Lakers themselves.

Coach Phil Jackson noted Thursday that last season’s team was in this fix and tied it, 2-2, which gave him hope, although he conceded this season’s team hadn’t “gone through as many battles with so many successes.”

Of course, if you count their battles with each other, there were a lot.

These Lakers are all issues, starting with the dangling futures of Jackson, Kobe Bryant and who knows who else. They’re Icarus flying ever closer to the sun with wings of wax, and they’ve been hurtling toward this moment since they won the first of their three titles in 2000.

Their next season was eclipsed by the feud between Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal, but still ended up in a title in 2001 and a record 15-1 postseason.

O’Neal and Bryant were fine the next two seasons, which revolved around O’Neal’s injuries and conditioning, as they descended ever lower in the standings.

Nevertheless, they won their third title in 2002, although it took Robert Horry’s miracle three-pointer to get them past Sacramento in the West finals.

They might even have made it four as a No. 5 seed last spring if Horry’s Game 5 three-pointer against the Spurs had stayed down.

By then they thought finishing fifth was about as good as fourth, which was about as good as third, which was about as good as second, which was about as good as first.

Actually, O’Neal wasn’t quite the same, and if they were still the team everyone feared, they were no longer miles ahead of the pack. In a development the Lakers missed, challengers were arising who could stand up to them, as Yao Ming began doing to O’Neal.

Last summer’s arrival of Karl Malone and Gary Payton seemed to restore the Lakers to greatness, but Bryant’s arrest threw their season -- oh, and his life -- into turmoil.

They were never what they could have been, not even when they were fit and healthy and everything seemed to be falling into place during a late-season 11-game winning streak. They came out of it with no momentum and more controversies.

Of course, in the playoffs, they assured everyone, they would put their many issues behind them.

They did, for a game.

In Game 2 against the Houston Rockets, Payton got upset at not playing in the fourth quarter. It happened again in Game 3. By Game 4, O’Neal, Bryant and Malone started looking for Gary, trying to help him through this difficult time.

Because they led the series only 2-1, this might have been heartwarming but it wasn’t playoff basketball.

Then came the Spurs, who run 50 pick-and-roll plays a night against them, as every other team does, but with the cat-quick Tony Parker, whom the Lakers couldn’t catch with a net.

O’Neal was now not only playing hard, he was jumping out on the pick-and-roll as he never had before. This was the way it had always been. No matter what adventures the Lakers embarked on, O’Neal would get serious in the playoffs, Bryant would get lucid and that would be enough.

Now, with rivals as good as they are, May was a little late to be putting in their defense.

Had O’Neal played this way all season, they might have had their rotations down by now, so Malone might have gotten to Tim Duncan before that third-quarter dunk in Game 2, and they might have avoided that timeout “miscommunication,” in which everyone actually seemed to be communicating quite well.

Of course, if the Lakers had defended well enough to win one more game this season, this series would have started here, rather than in a certain tourist trap.

Nor can it help that the Lakers’ problems keep following them around.

Payton’s discontent is actually small potatoes, paling in importance to the Shaq-Kobe problem, the Kobe-Phil relationship and the Phil-Jerry Buss impasse.

Nevertheless, Payton’s distress continues. After Wednesday’s game, he sat in the stands, talking to his agent, Aaron Goodwin, sounding upset enough to demand to be traded on the spot.

And, as if for old times’ sake, O’Neal’s stepfather, Phillip Harrison, the former drill sergeant, criticized Bryant in the San Antonio News-Express, saying Kobe should throw the ball to Shaq more, adding that they “just work together, that’s all.”

This was more like a blast from the past than a scoop. Jackson called it “humorous” before Game 2, discounting any impact on his players.

Were they beyond caring about stuff like that?

“Perhaps,” Jackson said. “This team, for sure.”

After the game, in which O’Neal had 32 points and Bryant eight assists, Sarge said Shaq still hadn’t got the ball enough. But that wasn’t a newsflash, either. After Bryant’s brilliant Game 5 against Houston, in which he scored 31 points with 10 assists, Shaq stomped out without comment.

These days, Bryant seems to shoot too much, or too little, and even if he gets it right, someone’s nose may still be out of joint. Put it all together and it spells d-y-s-f-u-n-c-t-i-o-n.

The Lakers might not even be as good as they were a year ago, when they didn’t have Rick Fox and Devean George available, to say nothing of Malone and Payton, and still might have turned the series around if Horry’s three-pointer had gone down.

O’Neal and Bryant were OK then. Now the Lakers are scattered and the Spurs are tough enough to withstand rallies, as opposed to last spring when they blew one big lead after another en route to their title.

Plus, Horry is a Spur now, so there’s always the possibility he could drop the hammer on his old teammates, which would have a certain symmetry.

This is a kick in the pants for Malone, whose modestly talented Utah teams maxed themselves out. He didn’t even know there was another way, but he does now.

Now part of the “greatest array of talent ever assembled on one team,” he can only dream of what the Lakers would be if his new program worked the way his old one did.

“Of course you think that,” Malone said after Game 2 in his role as the new Laker stand-up guy. “Everybody always thinks, ‘If this, if that,’ but to play with talent like these guys, it would be unbelievable.

“But these are the cards you’re dealt and it’s just the way it is.”

The question isn’t simply whether the Lakers are good enough, but whether the forces that have bound them to this point are still greater than the forces that threaten to blow them apart.

Having fought each other through their days of wine and roses, they’re not ideally suited to dealing with pressure in their season of the witch.

Nevertheless, the pressure is here.