All Things Considered, This Has Been Half Bad

The season is half gone, maybe half blown, and what the Lakers have to show for it is nothing at all.

Their four-peat, the preparation for which began almost before they dismissed the New Jersey Nets from the NBA Finals seven months ago, has at times seemed ridiculously difficult.

The season is half gone, 41 games gone, they have 19 wins, and Kobe Bryant has a sore knee, and, apparently, so does Shaquille O’Neal.

Bryant, named Thursday as a starting guard on the Western Conference All-Star team and the league’s leading vote-getter, said his right knee, made sore by tendinitis, was improved.

Asked what ailed his left knee, O’Neal said, “Nothing. A lot. But nothing.”

Yao Ming, outscored and outplayed by O’Neal a week ago in Houston, will be the conference’s starting center. O’Neal must wait until next week to see if he will be named a reserve for the Feb. 9 game.

Bryant and O’Neal will play tonight against the Nets.

Meantime, the careless losses that for three years were forgotten, rationalized away as momentary slips of concentration unrelated to their championship objectives, now mean the difference in running down the Phoenix Suns, or Houston Rockets, or, maybe, whoever it is that claims the eighth place in the Western Conference.

Bryant did not practice Thursday, the morning after Earl Boykins and the Golden State Warriors beat them with a couple of short runners at Staples Center. While 11 Lakers ran drills on the floor, Bryant sat in a courtside folding chair beside O’Neal, who was on his back, on a massage table.

“I’m not really concerned,” O’Neal said.

O’Neal came off the injured list two months ago and the Lakers are 16-13 since, killing his MVP candidacy and, it would seem, driving up the cost of Mitch Kupchak’s telephone bill. There’s no telling what it has done for his anxiety level.

At that 16-13 rate, the Lakers would win 23 games in the second half, for 42 total wins, and a very iffy playoff existence. As it stands, they are closer to also-rans Golden State and Seattle (half a game) and the Clippers (2 1/2 games) than they are the final playoff spot (4 1/2 games).

“Four-and-a-half games is not as easy to make up as you head into the second phase of the season as you think it would be,” forward Rick Fox said. “We’re going to have to beat teams. They’re not going to slide back to us.”

The softest part of the Lakers’ schedule is nearly over. Actually, it ends Wednesday, when four days off culminate in a game at Phoenix, followed two nights later by a game in Sacramento. February brings three sets of home-and-road back-to-back series, and March is a brutal travel month.

O’Neal, their hero the last three springs, said he is capable of producing his playoff game four times weekly. It’s possible he’s their only hope, rickety knee, swollen toe and all.

“If I did it, then I’m capable of doing it,” he said. “I’m good enough to do it, to get it done.

“I’ve just got to suck it up and keep playing. And I will.”

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After receiving assurances from the Lakers that it would not happen again, the NBA has chosen not to punish them for holding a private practice Jan. 16 in Houston, where media were excluded.... Said Bryant on his sore knee: “It comes and goes. I think it’ll go away pretty quickly.” Trainer Gary Vitti said, “He’ll be fine.”

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TONIGHT

vs. New Jersey

7:30, Fox Sports Net, ESPN2

Site -- Staples Center.

Radio -- KLAC (570), KWKW (1330), KIRN (670).

Records -- Lakers 19-22, Nets 28-14.

Record vs. Nets -- 0-1.

Update -- The Nets arrived in Oakland on Thursday night having lost Monday at Utah and Tuesday at Sacramento, the early part of a five-game Western Conference tour. Then they went out and matched the Lakers by losing to the Warriors, despite 41 points by Jason Kidd. The Nets beat the Lakers, 98-71, on Dec. 19 in East Rutherford. Rodney Rogers (calf) and Dikembe Mutombo (wrist) are on the injured list.