NBA PLAYOFFS Spurs sideline Lakers in six

San Antonio snapped Los Angeles' three-year championship run, 110-82.
By TIM BROWN
LOS ANGELES TIMES
LOS ANGELES -- Then it was done.
After three years, three NBA championships and all that came with it, it was done, the Los Angeles Lakers worn too thin in the middle, grown too old on the edges, the rest of the league having come too fast.
The San Antonio Spurs, the last team to have won the title before the Laker reign, eliminated the Lakers in the sixth game of the Western Conference semifinals Thursday night, 110-82, at Staples Center.
With just more than two minutes remaining and Los Angeles trailing by 25 points, the people stood and cheered, and Laker Girls cried, and Laker players touched each other's hands. They thanked them for all of it, a three-peat that brought Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant and Phil Jackson together, from basketball worlds apart.
Derek Fisher's eyes reddened on the bench. Robert Horry's went with them. Their season was done in mid-May, the season having gone on without them, the Spurs off to play the winner of the Mavericks-Kings series in the conference finals.
Turnabout
"We had a tough couple of years with these guys," said Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, eliminated the past two post-seasons by the Lakers. "To finally play well enough is beyond comprehension."
Tim Duncan, the league's most valuable player, scored 37 points and took 16 rebounds in the Lakers' second-largest home playoff loss since Jackson arrived four years ago. From a two-point lead midway through the third quarter, the young and fresh Spurs, often suspect in the fourth quarter, outscored the Lakers, 33-12, and the fourth championship was gone.
Bryant, whose voice shook an hour after he left the floor, said, "It's a foreign feeling. I don't like the feeling. I don't think anybody else likes the feeling.
"I don't ever want to feel it again."
When he left an interview room and met Horry, they hugged. There are five free agents, six if the Lakers decline to exercise Horry's option as it appears they will, and Laker management expects to rebuild in places around Bryant and O'Neal. So, some said good-bye for four months, others for longer, and Bryant, tough on his teammates in a regular season that brought only 50 wins, frowned now at what he knew would be change.
"I can't even form the words," he said. "We had so many battles together."
Bryant scored 20 points and O'Neal had 31 points and 10 rebounds on a knee he said hurt "a little bit."