At the Strain Threshold / After a torturous season, Lakers are banged up physically and, perhaps, psychically. Ready or not, playoffs are here.

It seems as though half the organization is day-to-day, the ones not limping or bandaged only one bad week from thinking about where they’d do this next season.

But even as they nearly had to carry someone else out Friday (a collision between wire-service writer and television camera left an inch-long head wound and more work for trainer Gary Vitti), the Lakers arrived again at the postseason, the fifth in the Phil Jackson-Shaquille O’Neal-Kobe Bryant era, the first in the Gary Payton-Karl Malone experiment.

The Houston Rockets, in the playoffs for the first time since the Lakers eliminated them in 1999, will sit on the other bench, wear the red uniforms, bear the occasional public insult, starting tonight at Staples Center.

As of postseason eve, however, the Laker priorities were decidedly internal, the health of Malone, Rick Fox, Derek Fisher and others at least as critical as their strategic preparations for the Rockets. After all, they’d played the seventh-seeded Rockets four times already, and as recently as two weeks ago, and as assistant coach Tex Winter said, smiling, “I don’t know what we can do in a day that’s going to change anything.”

They’d get to O’Neal vs. Yao Ming and Bryant vs. Cuttino Mobley and Payton vs. Steve Francis. First, Jackson would pass through the trainer’s room. About 30 hours before game time, he said he expected Fox and Malone to start Game 1, and hedged some on Fisher and Devean George. Fisher and George said they hoped to play.

With Vitti putting them all back together as fast as he could, Malone sat before reporters with a huff and crossed his arms. Ever the gamer, Malone wanted to be available to reporters but could bring himself only to growl a few terse answers before concluding, “Look, let’s just say this right here. I came here for this. You’d have to shoot me in the head for me not to play. So let’s get that out of the way right now. The end. The end of story.”

To recap, Malone, one of the great power forwards of all time and, at 40, still one of the better active ones, sprained his right ankle near the end of the first half Wednesday. After that, George strained his calf. Then, Fisher strained his groin. The flight home from Portland was less charter jet than Medivac.

Fox dislocated his right thumb April 9, had it realigned right there on the sideline and, by team accounts, was to miss up to three weeks while it healed. Meanwhile, doctors would attempt to construct a device that would protect the thumb and allow him to play.

Eight days were all that were necessary. Fox practiced Friday and said he would play with nothing but a soft bandage on his thumb.

“No doubt about it,” he said. “I’ve got to, man. This is the time.”

If these Lakers are going to have a time, this would have to be it. After a tumultuous regular season in which things looked harder than most assumed they would be, the playoffs arrived in a package containing a 7-foot-6 center and a scary-good backcourt. The Rockets and Lakers split four games for the second consecutive season.

So, the peripheral musings of what the Lakers might look like next season, and whether this might not be the end of something almost before it got started, didn’t carry too many conversations Friday.

“I don’t know if that dog is going to hunt or not,” Jackson said. “It’s great, there’s sentimentality to it.... We did make that as a statement for our season, so it’s always sat there in the background. [But] we don’t want to get that emotionally involved with that right now.”

Later, Jackson added, “I have talked about the fact it’s championship season. This is the winning time. This is winning time in basketball.”

He would know. He has coached nine NBA champions, played for two others. Five Lakers played every season of the three-peat, a dynastic run that ended a year ago against the San Antonio Spurs.

So Malone and Payton came to get theirs, to patch the holes created by age and neglect and bad luck, and here they stand. Malone’s the one leaning a little to the left, off the bad ankle, one more thing in one of those years.

“This year just seems like nothing ever really got settled,” Fisher said. “Every time it seemed like we were kind of settling in and getting to know each other and playing good, something would happen that would take us back a couple steps. I think that was the biggest difference with this season. There was never really a point where we got comfortable as a team.”

It might not be entirely easy, Fisher said, but “I think we’re all excited because I don’t think we know what to expect. I don’t think we know how good we can be. But now, we get our chance to audition and we’ll see what happens when we get on stage.”