Lakers Add to Knicks’ Woes With 113-87 Romp in Garden

NEW YORK —  This town is still home for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The uniform says it’s home for Patrick Ewing, too, but it’s hardly the haven it is for Abdul-Jabbar, a favored son.

“I haven’t played on a team here since high school, and we were winners,” said Abdul-Jabbar, one-time big man on campus at Power Memorial Academy.

“I have no conception of what he’s going through.”

Abdul-Jabbar saw enough in the Lakers’ 113-87 win over the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden Tuesday night to be grateful he isn’t.

Ewing is a franchise player on a franchise going south, a 7-foot center who is not buttressed by the presence of another 7-footer, Bill Cartwright, but seemingly shaken to the foundation.

Tuesday night, he had one of his better games, scoring 20 points and grabbing a game-high 15 rebounds, but that couldn’t keep the Knicks--the only team in the NBA averaging fewer than 100 points a game--from being held to its lowest output of the season.

And that was in its home debut under new Coach Bob Hill, the assistant who was promoted when Hubie Brown was fired last week.

The Knicks are losers, big losers. Two seasons ago, they won just 24 games. Last season, it was 23, even though they won the draft lottery and took Ewing, a giant presence at Georgetown, a giant center of great expectations yet unfulfilled in New York.

So far this season, the Knicks are 5-16, a record only two teams, the Nets and Clippers, can surpass in ugliness.

The crowd of 19,320 in the Garden did not jeer the Knicks as much as it ignored them. Fans saved their cheers for courtside spectators Ron Darling, Gary Carter and Darryl Strawberry of the Mets and Lawrence Taylor of the Giants.

They also had cheers for the 15-3 Lakers, especially Magic Johnson, who had 22 points, 15 assists, 8 rebounds, and 4 steals, and Abdul-Jabbar, who had 20 points and 7 rebounds.

Johnson assisted on four of the Lakers’ first five baskets and scored the next three, when the Lakers opened a 27-19 lead in the first quarter.

He also scored the Lakers’ last eight points of the third quarter, when the Lakers expanded a 51-41 halftime lead to 86-70.

The Knicks, meanwhile, went the first 4:58 of the second quarter without scoring a point. They made one basket in a span of almost nine minutes between the time Gerald Wilkins scored on a drive with 3:52 left in the first until Ewing banked a shot off the glass at 7:02 of the second.

In the second half, when Abdul-Jabbar got into foul trouble and Laker Coach Pat Riley played A.C. Green and Kurt Rambis against the Knick 7-footers, the Laker lead grew even more.

Cartwright took four shots in 32 minutes and finished with eight points. The Knicks’ starting forwards, Pat Cummings and rookie Kenny Walker, scored nine points, with Walker scoreless in 16 minutes.

Wilkins led the Knicks with 22 points, but Gerald Henderson, the guard the Knicks obtained from Seattle supposedly to solve their need for a point guard, was 1 for 8 from the floor and committed four damaging turnovers in 23 minutes. Henderson limped off the court with a strained Achilles’ tendon late in the game.

But Ewing is supposed to be the savior.

“He has it extremely difficult,” Rambis said. “He’s a quality player coming into the league to a team decimated by injuries (Bernard King and Cartwright) last season. And this season, they rely on him so much.

“That’s very taxing for a young player to carry that load. It’s like with Kareem, they double and triple team him.

“People don’t realize how difficult that is, how wearing it is. The pushing and shoving inside is much more wearing than running up and down the court.”

People expect the New York skyscrapers to function as smoothly as Houston’s Twin Towers, Rambis said, but it just doesn’t work that way.

“Ralph (Sampson) plays outside a lot, which probably takes something away from Ralph’s game, but Akeem (Olajuwon) is the better player inside,” Rambis said.

“Cartwright and Ewing play exactly the same kind of game, an inside game. When they’re both in there, you have four big people standing in the lane, and that cuts down the opportunities for your guards to operate.”

And the Knicks have asked Ewing to do something Abdul-Jabbar was never faced with--to play power forward as well as center. And what if they had?

“It would have been traumatic,” the Laker center said.

And that certainly doesn’t sound like home.

Laker Notes

This was the first game of the Lakers’ five-game trip, with the Bucks in Milwaukee next tonight. “We wanted this one before going into Milwaukee,” Laker Coach Pat Riley said. “They’ve had five days to prepare for us, which means we’re going to meet a team that has a hell of a scheme.” . . . Riley said he might use Kurt Rambis and A.C. Green in the lineup at the same time against Boston’s Robert Parish and Kevin McHale on Friday night. “I like the two of them, they’re good defensive players,” Riley said. “Kurt gets the ball out quicker than anybody, and A.C. runs the floor real well.” . . . Byron Scott, who scored a season-high 26 points Sunday, suffered through a 2-for-10 shooting night against the Knicks. . . . James Worthy, who had failed to score 20 points in 10 of the last 12 games, scored 20 Tuesday. . . . Rookie Billy Thompson had nine points in 16 minutes, including an extended stretch in the second period.