LOS ANGELES -- When he was a younger Kidd, growing up in Oakland, Calif., Jason Kidd saw the no respect thing play out in the lack of attention Northern California high school basketballers got compared to SoCal players.
Now, with an entire country and 10 years between those days and now, Kidd, the star point guard of the New Jersey Nets, is watching the lack of respect angle play itself out all over again, as the Nets prepare to meet the heavily favored and defending two-time champion Los Angeles Lakers in Game 1 of the NBA Finals tonight.
"Nobody's going to give us a chance. We all understand that," Kidd said yesterday at the Lakers' practice facility. "We understand that we're playing against the best team and against, by far, the two best players in the world.
"But, unfortunately, we have to play the games. And that's the way we're going to approach it. We're going to give it our best shot. We have nothing to lose. I said earlier, it's destiny against dynasty and hopefully destiny will overcome the dynasty."
The lack-of-respect card has been played over and over to a fare-thee-well in sports, but heading into this championship series, the Nets have as much credibility to play it as anyone ever has in the NBA.
The Nets' franchise, which won two of the last three titles in the now-defunct American Basketball Association in the mid-1970s, moved to the NBA in 1976-77, and had been mired in dreadfulness ever since.
Name the malady and the Nets invariably suffered from it, from bad draft choices to bad luck to tragedy to everything in between. Things got so laugh- able at one point that former New Jersey forward Chris Morris once took to the court with two words handwritten on his sneakers.
The word on the left shoe was "Trade," and the word on the right was "me."
It's understandable, then, that most of the basketball world has had great difficulty in coming to terms with the Nets' startling turnaround, from a team that won just 26 games last season, to a team that not only won a franchise-record 52 contests and its first Atlantic Division title, but captured the best record in the Eastern Conference and won its first seven-game playoff series.
As the playoffs progressed and the Nets (52-30) beat first Indiana, then Charlotte, followed by Boston, the numbers of doubters have shrunk, but are still noticeable.
"I don't have to make my case. We're here," said forward Kenyon Martin, the first player chosen in last year's college draft. "We have to play the game. I don't have to plead my case. We've been playing well in the playoffs. If not, we wouldn't be here. There's only two teams left playing, and we're one of them, so if we haven't proven to people that we can play, by this point, we're not going to do it."
Indeed, their coach, Byron Scott, the shooting guard on three Lakers title teams of the 1980s, declared yesterday that the Nets are "the biggest underdogs in the history of the NBA Finals," which may be an overstatement, but not by much.
New Jersey's task is to stop Los Angeles (58-24), which became the first road team in 25 years to win a seventh game in the Western Conference finals, from winning its third straight title.
Within that Herculean chore is the sizable battle of slowing Lakers center Shaquille O'Neal and shooting guard Kobe Bryant, who carried Los Angeles through the first three rounds of the playoffs, particularly in Games 6 and 7 of the Western finals against Sacramento, when the Lakers came back from a 3-2 deficit to win this berth in the NBA Finals.
Scott, who played with O'Neal and Bryant for a season before he retired after the 1996-97 season, intends to shuttle a variety of defenders on them, with three different centers spending time on O'Neal, and five different players guarding Bryant.
"We're going to be aggressive on both ends of the court," said Scott. "We're a much better defensive team than Sacramento is, and that's throughout the season. So we know that we can play just as well as we've been playing the past two series."
With Kidd, who was dealt to New Jersey from Phoenix last off-season, as trigger man, the Nets intend to push the tempo, intending to run on offense, even after the Lakers make baskets. Kidd, who has arguably been the most valuable player of the playoffs, if not the regular season, averaged a triple double in the Eastern finals against Boston, and will be the focus of the Lakers' defensive push.
"We've got to get back and stop the ball," Los Angeles coach Phil Jackson said. "That's the first rule against Jason Kidd. After that, know that he facilitates their offense. He's not interested in scoring; he's interested in winning. He'll do whatever it takes to help this team win the game."
Talk of winning isn't what the Nets and their long-suffering fans are used to, but if Kidd and his teammates have their way, at the end of this series, they'll receive the unlikeliest moniker of all -- that of world champions.
"My teammates have been knocked down, and tortured in a sense of having been at the bottom of the barrel for so long in their short careers in New Jersey," Kidd said. "We surprised a lot of people in the sense of maintaining first place all season. Then nobody thought we could win a playoff series, and from there, it just grew into, 'They're not going to beat Charlotte,' and 'They're not going to beat Boston.'
"Well, now we're here. We're not here on a paid vacation. We're not here to be in Hollywood to help our acting careers or to get deals. We're here to play basketball. ... We're going to play the game for 48 minutes and see what happens."