A Key Game for Both Teams

Battling each other--and their own team crises--the Lakers and Rockets face off tonight in Houston separated by a half-game, but not a lot else.

Who’s lagging most in this struggle for home-court advantage in the best-of-five series?

The Lakers absorbed a 27-point pounding from San Antonio on Saturday, have lost five of their last seven and, with a 6-7 April record, are No. 5 and hardly pushing Houston for the No. 4 playoff spot.

The Rockets were handed a 24-point thumping in Phoenix on Sunday, lost to Dallas and the Clippers in succession before that, and are 5-8 in April, barely fending off the Lakers.

“We’re both kind of going up and down,” Laker Coach Kurt Rambis said after Sunday’s practice in Houston.

“The Rockets, like us, they made a lot of changes. All their changes, or most of their changes anyway came at the beginning of the year. We’ve had a lot of changes and ours happened in the middle of the year.”

Let’s say it this way: Both were thought to be championship contenders when the season started, but neither one appears to pose much of a threat to Utah, San Antonio or Portland.

“It would be great to have home-court advantage,” Rambis said. “Especially in the first round. It’s important to have that.

“But it doesn’t matter if we’re not playing good basketball. It keeps going back down to that. If we’re playing really good basketball and we don’t have it, then we have a better chance of doing well in the first round than if we have it and we’re not playing well.”

Kobe Bryant, who has been favoring a sore leg for several days since slamming into Golden State’s Felton Spencer--”I feel like I’m about 23 years old,” the 20-year-old Bryant said, grinning--said that the Lakers don’t need a confidence-builder against the Rockets.

“I don’t think it’s so much proving that we can beat them,” Bryant said. “We’ve proved that already this year.

“But it’s important for us to try to improve on our basketball playing. I think we’ve done that in some games previously, in San Antonio, that was a step back.”

TONIGHT vs. Houston

5 p.m. PDT, Channel 9.

* Site--Compaq Center.

* Radio--KLAC (570).

* Records--Lakers 27-18; Rockets 27-17.

* 1999 Record vs. Rockets--2-0.

* Update--In two early-season meetings at the Great Western Forum before the acquisition of Glen Rice sent him to the backcourt, Bryant matched up well against Rocket small forward Scottie Pippen to key Laker victories.