Road to the top can be bumpy one for Lakers

The journey hits a pothole.

Just when it looked as if it were safe to pack their brooms, the Lakers, who gave out gold “The journey Begins 4-19-09” T-shirts Sunday, saw the seemingly-outclassed Utah Jazz cut a 20-point deficit to three, before a Staples Center crowd that spent half of Tuesday night celebrating and the other half gasping.

The Lakers wound up winning, 119-109, taking a 2-0 lead in their first-round series, and left the floor, knowing they have things to work on, like staying awake all game.

“We are a better team playing against them now than we were to start with,” said Utah Coach Jerry Sloan.

“The first thing we had to do was player harder. The bottom line is, you’ve got to play hard and the rest will take care of itself. . . .

“That’s the strange thing about this business. We’re supposed to be eliminated in four straight games, but we’ll see what happens.”

Coach Phil Jackson, who counts down from 16 to one in his team’s quest for a title, was so upset when the Lakers let the Jazz cut a 22-point lead to nine in the opener, he wrote on the whiteboard after the game, “15? Not like that”

As it turned out, it was “15, even worse” but Jackson decided to take the heat off his players, blaming himself for putting his reserves in.

The Jazz tried desperation before the series when Sloan called down fire on his own position, inviting nationwide scorn by terming his team’s prospects as “bleak.”

If his players were upset at being written off, falling behind by 22 in the first half of Game 1 suggested Sloan knew what he was talking about.

In Game 2, the Jazz went into No More Mr. Nice Guy mode, after Sloan noted how nice his players were, compared to his “nasty” stars of yesteryear.

A year after the Jazz took the Lakers six hard games in the West semifinals, Sloan was back to telling his players to respect the Lakers “but don’t over-respect them, and don’t be intimidated by them.”

Not that Carlos Boozer is going to turn into Karl Malone overnight, or ever.

“We changed as soon as [John] Stockton and Malone left -- not everything, but they’re no longer there,” said Sloan before the game.

“We can’t make somebody they aren’t.”

Determined to come out faster than it had in Game 1, when Sloan said his players were like “a deer in the headlights,” the Jazz couldn’t have been happy to see the Lakers go for 41 points . . . in the first quarter.

Determined to punish the shorter Jazz inside, Jackson had his team socking the ball into Andrew Bynum for the opening tip.

Coming back from his seven-point, five-rebound effort in Game 1, Bynum scored 10 points in the first seven minutes, making his first five shots.

The Lakers, who had shot 70% in the first quarter of Game 1, shot 86% in the first quarter of Game 2.

Determined to hold a big lead after letting the Jazz catch them in Game 1, Jackson was dismayed to see it happen again, when Utah cut the Lakers’ lead, which had grown to 20 points, to six points on two occasions in the third quarter.

Since no one can sweep anyone in the first two games of a best-of-seven series, it’s not an official mismatch until the Lakers win Game 3 or 4 in Salt Lake City.

Of course, if the Lakers lose both, as they did last season, it’s not a mismatch at all, like last season’s series.

A year ago, the Lakers beat the Jazz by double figures in Games 1 and 2, before the Jazz showed it was ready for prime time, tying it, 2-2, with Kobe Bryant suffering back spasms in Game 4.

Back in Staples Center, with Bryant still limited after two days of treatment, the Lakers had to shoot it out deep in the fourth quarter with the Jazz, scoring 10 of the last 14 points to win, 111-104.

But this isn’t a year ago . . . yet.

Showing whose night it was, Lamar Odom made one jump hook when Utah’s Matt Harpring smacked him across the forearm, after which the ball flew out of Lamar’s hand, into the hoop.

Then there was the free throw Bryant banked in, off the back of the rim . . . and the top of the backboard.

On the other hand, the Lakers are playing in spurts, as if they have a very high opinion of themselves, indeed, with some unlikely three-point shooters like Odom and Shannon Brown knocking in one after another.

Beware Utah, where Lakers hubris goes to die.

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mark.heisler@latimes.com