Lakers Finally Stop Bleeding

His upper lip was swollen and his speech thickened, but Kobe Bryant didn’t mind paying the price of a chipped tooth, bloodied mouth and four stitches on the inside of his lip if it meant helping the Lakers end their four-game losing streak.

“I liked it,” said Bryant, the victim of a mouth-to-forehead collision with Antawn Jamison in the fourth quarter. “I think I shoulda been a boxer. I get off on stuff like that. It feels good.”

It might not have felt so good if the Lakers hadn’t held on for a 96-89 overtime victory over the Golden State Warriors before a sellout crowd of 18,997 Friday at Staples Center. And in truth, it was as ugly as Bryant’s mouth, no matter that Bryant scored a season-high 45 points on 18-for-40 shooting.

“I hate overtime. I wanted to go home,” said Robert Horry, who scored seven of his nine points in the extra period, including a three-point basket that gave the Lakers the lead for good and a three-point play off a layup and flagrant foul.

“It was my fault we went to overtime. I should have shot instead of throwing the ball away.”

Golden State had erased a 10-point Laker fourth-quarter lead and tied the game with 4.2 seconds left on a three-pointer by Jason Richardson. Horry’s subsequent errant pass set up the collision between Bryant and Jamison with six-tenths of a second to play.

The Warriors took a brief lead in overtime, but Horry, hobbled by a bad heel and sore legs and sore temper, took charge.

“We shouldn’t have even gone to overtime,” he said.

But they did, and thanks to Horry, the Lakers (3-6) avoided the indignity of a five-game losing streak and of dropping to last place in the Pacific Division behind the Warriors (2-8).

“We may need a couple of wheelchairs to play some of those guys out there,” said Laker Coach Phil Jackson, who never experienced a five-game skid with the team but had one with the Michael Jordan-less Bulls in 1994.

Asked if he was impressed by the team’s late effort and saw reason for optimism while the Lakers await the return next week of Shaquille O’Neal, Jackson chose to see the pessimistic side.

“I saw them lose a 10-point lead in the last four minutes of the ballgame,” he said. “A team as experienced as we are shouldn’t do that.... It was an effort we had to make in the fourth quarter. To get a victory ultimately is what the struggle is all about.”

The operative word there being “struggle.” The Lakers could never shake the Warriors, who shot 36.6% from the floor, and their offense was Kobe-heavy. Besides Horry’s late exploits, the only other bright spots were the 12 points and 14 rebounds collected by Samaki Walker, and the 14 rebounds pulled down by Rick Fox.

Jackson said he wasn’t hoping Bryant was his normal self after the collision, “I was hoping he might not be his normal self in the sense somebody else might take some shots. We needed somebody to step up and at that point, nobody was meeting those demands.”

Said Bryant: “We just wanted to get a win. I think it’s important for the other guys to get some confidence. Samaki played well, and Brian [Shaw] got some minutes. The important thing is to get their confidence going.”

Jackson had said before the game that even though he knew Friday’s loser would occupy last place in the Pacific Division, it was too early to worry about such things. If the fear of being last didn’t inspire the Lakers, it did seem to give impetus to the Warriors, who hung tough in the third quarter and pulled ahead, 55-53, taking advantage of a 3 1/2-minute silence by the Lakers’ offense.

Each time the Lakers seemed ready to pull away -- such as after a dunk by Bryant gave them a 63-57 lead with 2:06 left in the third quarter -- they sabotaged their own cause with poor defensive rebounding, poor shooting and turnovers.

“We’re not feeling sorry for ourselves without Shaq,” Walker said. “We’ve been in these games and have the potential to win them and we should. It’s minor mistakes, turnovers, mental errors in the final minutes that have cost us.”

Said Fox: “We wanted to stay in the present and think about this team and not about how many games until Shaq comes back. We haven’t played like a championship team and we know it. Having a championship emblem on our chests doesn’t mean people are going to give it to us.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Very Big D

With a victory over New Jersey today, Dallas would be 10-0 when the Lakers pay a visit Tuesday. A look at the Mavericks’ hot start:

*--* DATE OPPONENT SCORE Oct. 30 at Memphis 119-108 Nov. 2 Phoenix 97-83 Nov. 4 Golden State 107-100 Nov. 6 at Toronto 106-92 Nov. 8 at Chicago 114-87 Nov. 9 Detroit 114-75 Nov. 11 Portland 82-73 Nov. 13 at Cleveland 103-99 Nov. 15 at Boston 97-86 Today at New Jersey 4:30 p.m Tuesday Lakers 5:30 p.m

*--*

RELATED STORIES

They’re 9-0: Mavericks get 32 points from Nowitzki to end Celtics’ six-game streak. D8

They’re 0-9: Grizzlies come up short against Timberwolves in Hubie Brown’s debut. D8