Breaks Aren’t Coming Fast Enough

Despite the Lakers’ desire, the return to the Showtime days, a vision that starts at the top with owner Jerry Buss and trickles down, hasn’t materialized, what with few fastbreak opportunities and even fewer conversions as the season has unfolded.

What began with an outburst -- 19 fastbreak points in a season-opener against Denver -- has slowly eroded, the “up” missing from up-tempo more often than not.

The Lakers averaged 13.5 fastbreak points over their first 12 games, but only 9.1 a game since then. They have gone eight games without more than 10 fastbreak points.

The latest case was Tuesday against the Toronto Raptors. The Lakers won the game, 117-99, but lost in fastbreak points, 19-8.

“I thought our break was not good,” Coach Rudy Tomjanovich said. “We had a chance to have some fun and we didn’t. We’ve got to start going back to the basic chest pass and take the layups and take care of business instead of getting into these scares. I bet we missed 15 layups.”

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Kobe Bryant remains fourth overall in Western Conference All-Star voting and second among West guards with 1,005,050 votes, about 60,000 behind Tracy McGrady of Houston.

The other Lakers among leading vote-getters are Vlade Divac, fifth among West centers with 95,913 votes, and Brian Grant, 10th among West centers with 42,050.

Grant and Divac have missed substantial playing time because of injuries.

Voting ends Jan. 23. The All-Star game is Feb. 20 in Denver.

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In his third game since coming off the injured list, Grant had a six-point, eight-rebound effort against Toronto, his best rebounding game since joining the Lakers.

Grant, 32, sat out 13 games while trying to rehabilitate his right knee, which has been bothered by severe tendinitis. He was averaging 4.5 points and 3.3 rebounds at the time, about one-third of his career averages.

“I think Brian Grant had a lot to do with us winning [that] game with his energy defensively,” Tomjanovich said.