LOS ANGELES -- It's almost summer, it's Hollywood or thereabouts, and so it's inevitable this would come up as a topic of the off day.

Blockbuster flops, naturally.

	Shaq would've scored 50 if Vlade Divac, right, hadn't started flopping, says Phil Jackson.

So many of the questions, as Game 3 approaches, are flop-related. Questions like: Will a week of loud protest from Phil Jackson and Shaquille O'Neal sound the whistles in O'Neal's favor? Or: Can Vlade Divac, renowned for his flawlessly synchronized On Your Baq attack, draw a few more charges inside to get Shaq off the floor? Or: Might an apprentice flopper, say Robert Horry or Derek Fisher, sink lower than Divac when Kings vs. Lakers resumes Friday night?

Used to be -- meaning a week ago -- that Divac's quotes about home-court advantage served as the controversy fuel around here. It all changed during Monday's Game 2 at Arco Arena, where Shaq racked up three offensive fouls that, in Jackson's words, jobbed "a player on the way to a 50-point game." Which in turn unleashed an unrelenting stream of complaints from the almighty coach and his all-world center, making it seem as though the series has shifted from the land of cowbells and suspect cheeseburgers to California's whine country.

Only problem there is that, after Game 1, it's the Kings who did the complaining, which they don't even try to deny. Surely you remember the Game 1 hubbub about the charge Divac drew that was ruled blocking, with his feet clearly planted outside the No-Flop semicircle? Plus the foul called on Doug Christie for smacking his cheek against Kobe Bryant's elbow?

"It's just posturing, or whatever it's called," admits Kings coach Rick Adelman. "Any team that plays in a playoff series, if you lose especially, you are going to have gripes about what happened. And you're going to vocalize them to the proper people in the NBA -- that's what we did after the first game."

Adelman, mind you, made these disclosures in an attempt to ridicule the Lakers' blatant attempts to influence the next set of officials, who will undoubtedly have read a newspaper or three by the time they arrive at Staples Center. "To me, it's like, 'Get a life,' " Adelman said, a sentiment easier to share now that the Kings still have one in the playoffs, having narrowly avoiding a fatal 0-2 deficit. "Move on, play the game, and if they're as good as they say they are they shouldn't be worried about the officials or anybody else."

Jackson, needling right back: "Vlade finds a way to do his antics at the right time to create the right situation and even then, he doesn't get every call. Vlade is very clever and one of the most intelligent players in the game. But even so, Shaq has a lot of fun playing against him."

Fine. Points taken. Onto a more pertinent flop-related question: Do Phil and Shaq have a case?

Fittingly, given the position in question, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Vlade indeed flops, but Shaq bulldozes. Both insist they're innocent, but both have admitted such practices in the past. Both will likewise keep doing what they do, but every three-man ref crew is bound to call things differently, thereby keeping flops on our radar at the expense of other pertinent issues, like Kobe's uncooperative stomach and Peja Stojakovic's bad ankle.

The issue follows O'Neal whether the press is blowing it up or not, given his unrivaled status as the toughest player in the league to officiate. No one else dishes out more damage and maybe no one takes as much hacking as Shaq, who generates little sympathy with no other 7-footers out there sporting Superman tattoos and carrying 350 pounds.

It's the same debate we heard during last June's NBA Finals, when Dikembe Mutombo insisted on guarding O'Neal face-first. The Lakers won Game 3 in Philly even after O'Neal fouled out, which led to Shaq's now-famous plea to Deke to "treat me like a game of checkers and play me." As in: Play me straight up.

Last summer, having safely collected title No. 2, Shaq let slip that those skirmishes under the hoop weren't all Mutombo's fault. Or his face's fault. "Was I giving offensive fouls to Dikembe Mutombo?" he said. "Yeah, I was. A couple times I did. Because you've got to. He's a shot-blocker, and you've got to bump him and get him off-balance."

More recently, Shaq went on a playful rant about how he has a penchant for retiring flopping foreigners: Arvydas Sabonis and Rik Smits, to name two. He'd love to make Divac next, since Shaq is the only guy we know to successfully work up any contempt for Divac, one of the friendliest characters the league offers.

Divac's mistake? Besides the flopping, which he openly used to joke about, Vlade's chief sin is that he preceded Shaq as the Lakers' center. O'Neal doesn't forget it and uses the memory to manufacture motivation for himself, vowing to trample on Divac every time he sees him. That's because Divac, above all other European imports and Jazz masters John Stockton and Karl Malone, remains the NBA's foremost flopper.

	“	I don't know what is flopping. I think Derek Fisher does a better job of that than I do. It's taking a charge. It's for the refs to decide. … I'm going to play like I've been playing my whole career. ”
		— Vlade Divac

"I don't know what is flopping," Divac insisted the other day, his jokes a memory. "I think Derek Fisher does a better job of that than I do. It's taking a charge. It's for the refs to decide. … I'm going to play like I've been playing my whole career."

Right. They're both guilty to a degree. Those red welts on Divac's chest and shoulders Monday night probably weren't self-inflicted, and O'Neal probably had some help getting to three fouls so fast, forcing him to the bench with 4:49 left in the first half and 23 of LA's first 43 points already next to his name. Like the series, call it a split so far.

There's little doubt that the game would be better with less flopping, or a stronger crackdown against it, much as every team not named Lakers believes that it's a necessary weapon against a behemoth like O'Neal. On whichever side you fall, there's another concern here. The series itself flopping.

Since the Kings are universally considered the only team out there that can take the Lakers past five games, where will that leave us if they don't? Had they lost Monday, another Western Conference Finals For The Ages would have been headed for Sweepdom, just like Lakers vs. Spurs 2001. Instead, it's 1-1. So we'll digest the rhetoric if we have to.

"It'll be good copy for three days," Adelman said, hoping now for a split in L.A. to keep these conference finals out of the flophouse.

Marc Stein, who covers the NBA for The Dallas Morning News, is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.