No Bark or Bite, Just a Howler

With apologies to Jefferson -- that’s Richard of New Jersey, not Thomas of Virginia -- this dog may not be dead, but it has seen better days.

Before the struggling Lakers met the not-red-hot-themselves Nets Thursday night in the (chortle) Rematch of Last Season’s Finalists, Laker Coach Phil Jackson noted that 20 losses at this time of year “would be devastating for us to overcome.”

Then the Lakers went out and notched Loss No. 17, convincingly, 98-71.

That’s with two games left on this trip, including the second game of a back-to-back tonight in Philadelphia, and a 2-12 road record, having beaten only the Clippers in Staples Center and the Grizzlies in Memphis (in overtime).

Not that the Lakers aren’t trying to return to normal.

Jackson got Kobe Bryant, who had been eerily quiet, to go back to firing, which Bryant did manfully, taking 29 shots, even if he wasn’t really up to it, with a cold so bad he had to cancel his David Letterman appearance.

Maybe better health would have helped, or Jackson forgot to mention they needed Bryant to hit a good percentage of them, too. He only made eight.

And the Lakers shot 30.2%, their low in the three-season-plus Jackson era, so even if they were determinedly upbeat afterward -- that itself an improvement in their behavior of recent weeks -- you can’t really say they have turned the corner yet.

“I’m a pretty patient guy when I have to be,” said Bryant, turning over a new leaf. “Right now, it’s important for us to be patient. We’re playing hard.... We haven’t packed it up. We’re going down to Philly tomorrow and see if we can’t play better....

“It was better tonight. We didn’t hang our heads, even when we made mistakes, even when we were down 15, 17 points. Nobody hung their head. We kept playing. We actually started playing even harder.”

Shaquille O’Neal was, as he has been for almost two weeks, silent on the subject, or any other, but at least neither of them demanded a trade for the other 10 guys on the roster.

It was just the usual, slouching into a new town under their traveling black cloud, to massive skepticism....

You think Byron Scott was going to worry about a team with O’Neal and Bryant getting off to a slow start?

Scott’s Nets, who ran away from the East a year ago, started the night tied for fourth in the conference, coming off defeats in Detroit and (wince) Madison Square Garden, where the ever-blunt Scott noted “We got the ... beat out of us.”

Scott’s new center, Dikembe Mutombo, acquired to help them deal with O’Neal, as opposed to all the little Nets Shaq stepped on last spring, wasn’t able to pick up the new offense, or catch enough of their passes with his none-too-soft hands. That was before he broke his right wrist and was lost until spring.

Mutombo is 36 and is making $53 million for this season and the next two, which means the Nets would be hard-pressed to get rid of him, or bring in another big man.

So if the Lakers thought they had “problems,” Scott wasn’t impressed.

“They’re having a little ... derailment, I guess you can say, for a few games, or whatever, a quarter of the season, and people are going crazy,” Scott said before the game.

“They’re still the best team in this league until somebody can prove it differently in June.”

Last spring, of course, the Lakers ran the Nets over in a 4-0 sweep, when Scott had his team try to single-cover O’Neal, who averaged 36 points, shot 59.5% and won his third Finals MVP award.

Scott said he watched Games 3 and 4, in which the Nets at least came close, over and over last summer and reached a conclusion:

“Shaq cannot be stopped,” he said, laughing.

Thursday night, with Bryant reasserting himself and the Nets swarming all over O’Neal when he did get the ball, Shaq got only 13 shots and scored a modest 19 points.

It was one of those nights for the Lakers. The effort was there (including a big performance on the offensive boards by usually serene-in-winter Robert Horry) but little else was.

Nor did things go their way, as they saw it.

In the second quarter, feisty referee Joey Crawford hit Horry with a fast technical foul. While Jason Kidd was shooting it, Jackson growled the length of the floor, “That’s bull, Joey!” Or something like that.

Crawford turned around and gestured for Jackson to wait until Kidd had made the free throw.

Then Crawford turned back to Jackson and gave him a T, too.

Minutes later, in another discussion, Crawford told Horry, “Relax, Rob.”

Jackson growled: “You relax. You’re the one we’re worried about.”

Later, the Lakers congratulated themselves on their fight, but after their last surge was repelled early in the fourth quarter, it became a Net rout, replete with uncontested dunks.

On the other hand, Jackson noted, he tried to pull Shaq with eight minutes left for “another fight, another day,” but the big guy wanted to stay in, and did until only 3:03 remained.

That was a good sign, too, said Jackson.

All these good signs ... what could go wrong now?

Tonight we’ll see.