Rambis: Team Is Hitting Peak

Grabbing the home-court edge against Houston in the upcoming first-round playoff matchup would just be an added bonus of the team’s recent upsurge, Coach Kurt Rambis said, and not the only reason to try to knock off Portland on Wednesday.

“If there is something on the line, obviously, we want to play well and win the basketball game,” Rambis said before the game.

“But, still, our primary goal is to play better basketball and work on our deficiencies and improve so that we’re playing our best basketball, which we are right now, at the end of the season. . . .

“We’re readier now than we’ve ever been. We’re still far from being the team we have the potential to become. But we are playing our best basketball.”

Rambis said he believes the team is playing better than during the 10-game winning streak in late February and early March.

“We talked about it during the win streak--even though we were wining, we weren’t doing everything we wanted to be doing as a team,” said Rambis, who took over after the first game of the win streak.

“We knew that as a coaching staff, watching videotape, stuff like that. We tried to improve with the practice time that we had and the areas that we felt we needed to improve on, but there wasn’t a whole lot of practice time, either.”

Though the locker room television played the Houston-Denver game before the game, there were few players on hand to watch and Rambis said the game’s outcome wouldn’t affect his coaching moves.

“I won’t be paying attention,” Rambis said.

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Starting point guard Derek Fisher has left his mark this season--mostly on his own arms, legs and cheekbone after taking flying dives for loose balls, crashing backward to draw charges, and sprinting into screens to draw offensive fouls.

“This is my third year and it feels like six the way I play,” Fisher said with a smile, pointing to scars on his calves and elbows, and remembering the black eye he received from a Patrick Ewing elbow.

“I don’t really feel it when I’m out there, but I feel it when I get home at night. I come home with these [bruises] there or four a night.

“If I get into a shower and I don’t feel a sting somewhere, I don’t feel like I really got anything accomplished.”

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Though Glen Rice worked his way smoothly into the offense Wednesday, Rambis said he has had no worries about Rice’s defensive performance as a Laker.

“His defense has been phenomenal,” Rambis said. “That’s been a major, major pleasant surprise for us. . . . He’s done an excellent job of improving his one-on-one defense and his team defense has been very very good.”