Rare postseason pain for Spurs always comes from Lakers

The "plane debacle," as Gregg Popovich calls it, must now be followed by the plain truth.
This is the first time this week that Popovich and his San Antonio Spurs know real misery.
How miserable?
For the first time in these playoffs, San Antonio has an inkling how Phoenix felt after the very first game of these playoffs.
There was no singular dagger plunged in late Wednesday by Kobe Bryant or anyone else in gold and purple that can compare to the triple hit by Tim Duncan in Round 1 to emotionally slay the Suns.
This, rather, was a form of gradual torture inflicted by Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers' increasingly sticky defense, making the travel trouble that San Antonio had just getting to the Western Conference finals seem almost pleasurable by comparison ... and instantly leading you to wonder about the Spurs' capacity to rebound.
Folding NBA-sized limbs into airplane seats -- even cushy airplane seats -- and spending the night on the grounded team jet is a full-fledged traumatic episode in this pampered universe. Yet none of that comes anywhere close to the sort of discomfort San Antonio found when it finally made it to the Staples Center, where the Spurs crashed from 20 points up with more than half of the third quarter gone to a crushing 89-85 defeat in Game 1.
"Hurts like hell," Popovich admitted.
That's the same guy known for aggressively downplaying his team's grandest successes and revealing little to nothing between grunts when the Spurs lose. On this night, though, not even Pop would try to soften the blow absorbed by his defending champs, who had responded to the disorienting journey that followed their Game 7 triumph Monday in New Orleans with almost 30 minutes of near-flawless basketball.
Which only wound up making the ending considerably more painful.
From a lead of 65-45 with 5:54 to go in the third quarter -- with Duncan outscoring Bryant by a tidy count of 20-4 at that point -- San Antonio uncharacteristically couldn't finish. The Spurs couldn't hold a lead that realistically should have been big enough to withstand L.A.'s inevitable run and the Spurs' equally expected fourth-quarter fatigue, all of which adds up to the larger failure to capitalize on Bryant's way-too-passive start.
Popovich saw it as Bryant "doing a trust-his-teammates thing" in a first half in which No. 24 scored just two points and took only three shots. You could only assume that Kobe was trying to get every other Laker into the series as quickly as possible. But Bryant actually angered his own coach with the unselfishness, prompting Phil Jackson to tell TNT's Craig Sager during Jackson's mandatory in-game interview that "Kobe went on vacation ... to the Bermuda Triangle instead of the sideline triangle."
Which, again, only saddled San Antonio with more regret.