Time to Rely on Brain, Not Heart

If the heart question hadn’t already been answered definitively, Phil Jackson got to it the other day. The Lakers’ coach came to an interview a few minutes after watching Robert Horry launch the kind of shot that would break a weak-willed team, and someone asked him whether he believed the Kings--conference finals neophytes, with no heroic history to lean on, still on the upside of the postseason learning curve--might be vulnerable in that regard.

“Of course I hope that’s true,” Jackson quickly replied, “but this is a [Sacramento] team that showed poise. I mean, they hit some big, tough shots down the stretch, coming into the gut of the game.

“We just made bigger plays.”

And that’s it, of course. That’s the thing. It isn’t about the heart in the here and now; it’s about the head. It isn’t in the chest; it’s between the ears.

It just isn’t about guts anymore. If you’ve stayed awake through even a week’s worth of games in this postseason, long enough either to watch Sacramento on the road in Salt Lake City or Dallas, you know the Kings passed Go on that issue a while back.

What it is, tonight at Arco Arena, is absolutely, positively about plays.

From the start of the Western Conference finals (and for roughly a thousand years before that, for those King fans scoring at home), one of the primary questions surrounding Sacramento’s NBA entry was whether it had the intestinal fortitude to survive the kind of semi-chaos that a bunch like the Lakers can induce in a team.

Alas, it’s your basic chin music. The heart question is such a cheap trap that at this point you can’t imagine anyone actually falling for it; but this is Sacramento, and these are the Kings, a bunch that always has been susceptible to reflexive defensiveness about the whole Tin Man thing.

This just in: Doesn’t matter now. This Sacramento team, this one right here, has plenty of heart--and had it even through that gruesome Game 4 finish, the 100-99 thunderbolt that came zinging out of the low L.A. sky.

It lost all the same.

The Kings weren’t failed by their constitutions; they were outplayed down the stretch. Mike Bibby didn’t come out of the locker room for the second half, take a deep breath and realize he was in over his head. What happened to Bibby was Kobe Bryant, not frayed nerves.

By now it is entirely evident that, however this series finishes up, these two teams are rough equals. The Kings are more talented top to bottom; the Lakers are possessed of two game-changing players before you even get to a bloodless last-shot artist like Horry.

The Lakers have a champion’s heart; the Kings are attempting to grow one. But it’s awfully close to a draw in the area of will, and that game on Sunday was decided on a play-by-play basis through the second half, not in one manic burst of momentum by L.A. nor a sudden loss of cabin pressure along the Sacramento side.