Lakers Are Cut Off at Overpass

Slowly, but ever more surely, the Lakers and the playoffs are distancing themselves from each other, amid a defense that bends and breaks, and a shaky offense that can’t quite figure out what to do when the ball is not in the hands of Kobe Bryant.

The Lakers lost for the second time in as many days against a lower-echelon Eastern Conference team, this time surrendering a bad quarter instead of a bad half and, when it counted, making one pass too many in a 117-115 overtime loss to the New York Knicks before 19,763 Monday at Madison Square Garden.

Bryant had 30 points and eight assists, but his final effort to get a ninth assist turned into the final play of a game that, yet again, the Lakers controlled late but couldn’t tuck away.

Bryant, who hit a three-pointer from the top of the arc with 4.4 seconds left in regulation to send the game to overtime, found Luke Walton along the left side of the lane in the waning seconds of overtime. Walton passed up a five-footer and tried to get the ball back to Bryant under the basket on the right side. Bryant fumbled away a shot that time might not have allowed anyway.

Bryant scrunched his face into a frown and, shaking his head, told Walton he should have shot the ball.

The aftermath brought an apology from Walton, an admonition from Coach Frank Hamblen and an unflattering analysis from guard Chucky Atkins, who, irritated recently by the strictness of the triangle offense, was angered by a number of issues.

First came Hamblen’s message.

“Our guys have to quit deferring to Kobe so much,” he said. “Kobe’s going to get his. There at the end, Luke has a little five- or six-footer or a layup or whatever. I just told him he’s got to shoot the ball. I’m not blaming him for losing this game, don’t get me wrong on that, but you’ve got to carry the threat out there. Maybe guys are expecting [Bryant] to do it all. You’ve got to be basketball players out there also, you can’t just defer to Kobe all the time.”

Later came Walton’s self-critical assessment, in which he accepted responsibility for the loss: “Ultimately it cost us the game tonight,” he said.

In between came a dour diagnosis from Atkins, who scored 22 points and found fault with a Laker defense that, after allowing 65 points in the first half of Sunday’s loss to the Toronto Raptors, almost topped it by surrendering 36 points in the third quarter against the Knicks.

The Lakers let Tim Thomas score 17 points in the quarter and trailed, 83-68, by the time the fourth rolled around.

“A lot of times the ball is dribbled into the paint and we don’t even see the ball,” Atkins said. “That’s just a characteristic of a bad defensive team. We have to talk to one another and help one another out.

“There’s no way a guy should be able to penetrate from outside the three-point line all the way to the middle without nobody stepping over. Guys are laying the ball in. Tim Thomas is getting the ball in the same block, doing the same move, scoring. Against good defensive teams, that don’t happen.”

Atkins was irritated enough by quarter’s end to bend Brian Grant’s ear for a few minutes at the end of the Laker bench.

“I was just frustrated because I don’t really think that we always play as a team,” Atkins said. “You look at the way we played in the third quarter, what got us in such a deep hole, is we come down and one pass, maybe two passes, and the ball gets stuck or the ball goes up. Then we compound that by not helping each other and playing bad defense. If you look at the way other teams are playing, they’re coming down and making two, three, four passes. And that’s what we should be doing.

“With guys like Kobe Bryant on our team, and Caron Butler, Lamar Odom, guys who can score, we should be using Kobe Bryant’s athletic ability and his offensive expertise to get two people to help and kick the ball and move the ball two or three times and we should be the team that’s getting wide-open shots. Well, we’re coming down sometimes, depending on who gets the ball, we don’t get no passes. We as a team need to move the ball.”

Atkins declined to name names.

Among other problems, the Lakers allowed Thomas to score 35 points, almost 25 more than his average, and let forward Michael Sweetney tie a career high with 19 points. (For good measure, he also tied a career high with 12 rebounds.)

Despite it all, the Lakers made a game of it, outscoring the Knicks, 14-2, in the final 1:16 of regulation, with Atkins, Odom, Butler and Bryant all making three-point shots.

Then came overtime, and the end of another chance to beat a team with a lesser record. Instead the Lakers fell to 28-27, a game ahead of Minnesota for the West’s last playoff spot.

“I thought [Walton] had a pretty good look at it,” Bryant said. “I wasn’t expecting the ball back. He fired it back to me, I bobbled it. When we do [talk], I’ll just tell him if I had to do the situation over again, I’d hit you again. I have complete confidence in his abilities to make that shot and I hope he knows that. When we get on the bus, that’s what I’m going to tell him.”