VIEW FROM THE OTHER SIDE

What papers in the Houston area are saying about the series:

FRAN BLINEBURY, HOUSTON CHRONICLE

M is for the many things he gave them.

O means only that it’s growing old.

T is for the tears shed over this one.

H is for a heart that’s rarely bold.

E is for an error big as Texas.

R is for the rest of a season’s excuses.

Put them together for the occasion, and they spell the mother of all turnovers by Scottie Pippen on a day when the Rockets once more turned poise into an orphan.

So you wanted more touches, Scottie? Maybe next time you won’t dribble the ball in the clutch with a pair of ham hands.

So you want to be the man who shows the way to the top?

Maybe next time somebody can show you the way to Glen Rice and ask you to guard him.

Pippen was given $14 million a year to bring the veteran leadership of six championship campaigns, and in his first playoff game with the Rockets, he came up positively small down the stretch. Tiny, teeny, minuscule.

With 7.6 seconds left in the game and the Rockets holding a one-point lead, the player who wants the ball in his hands dribbled into traffic in the lane and could not find a way to get it to Charles Barkley.

Coming up small after an entire game in which Barkley toyed with L.A. defenders in the low post to score 25 points, and in a fourth quarter when Barkley devoured both Robert Horry and J.R. Reid for an even dozen, Pippen ran straight at Kobe Bryant and dribbled himself right into the hardwood floor at the Great Western Forum.

He claimed he tripped or slipped or something. But the truth is, he looked just like Duke’s Trajan Langdon giving up the ball in the last seconds of the NCAA title game.