There’s No March in This Team

When was the last time you saw an underdog come out flat for an NCAA tournament game?

That would be the Lakers Monday night. And yes, these games are the equivalent of March Madness for them.

I feel sorry for the 20,173 fans who showed up at MCI Center Monday, one day after the arena finished being host to the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament. Now there was some passion. Did you see how badly Georgia Tech guard Will Bynum wanted to win? He willed his team past North Carolina and almost did the same to Duke in the final.

At least the fans saw one team play hard Monday. That would be the Washington Wizards, who deserved every bit of their 95-81 victory.

“We were beaten in absolutely every category,” Laker Coach Frank Hamblen said. “Except, I think, we had more assists (23-21). I’m very disappointed in how we came out and very disappointed in how we continued to play.”

Of all the problems with this team -- and the absence of a certain big man was particularly noticeable this night -- poor effort shouldn’t be one of them. Especially now.

The loss dropped them to 32-30, tied with Denver for the eighth and final playoff spot in the Western Conference.

Normally, March is the forgotten month of the NBA season. We know which teams are good, which teams are bad. It’s still too early to make the final push for the stretch drive. Start playing your best ball right now and you’ll expend all of your fuel by the middle of playoffs. It happened to Portland in 1991 and San Antonio in 2001. In 2001 the Lakers had the wisdom to wait until April to kick in the afterburners, and they lost only one game in three months en route to the championship.

“Every game is for us to focus on and devote our attention to, because we’re jockeying for that eighth playoff spot,” Kobe Bryant said before the game. “It’s a shift of focus from the previous years.”

They didn’t play like it. Not even Bryant, who finished with a pedestrian line of 18 points, six assists and four rebounds.

Shooting poorly, as the Lakers did in making only 35.2% of their shots, is one thing.

But they didn’t play half-court defense and they didn’t get back in transition defense. They let the Wizards have their way inside, outscoring them, 44-20, in the paint.

Everyone knows about the rough schedule the Lakers face. Monday was one of the toss-ups, perhaps even favorable for the Lakers. They had a day to rest up in Washington, while the Wizards played in Boston Sunday.

And the Wizards were slumping. They dropped eight of 11 and were battling injuries. They had only seven players available for one recent practice.

Last week the injury bug caught up with Antawn Jamison, forcing him to sit out for the first time in 386 games when the tendinitis in his knees became unbearable. He managed only eight minutes Monday before the knee flared up again.

This team is playing for playoff seeding, not its postseason life. It’s the difference between choosing entrees and hunting for a meal. Yet they still looked hungrier than the Lakers.

“You can control your rebounds and your effort,” Laker forward Brian Grant said. “We got outhustled in a lot of areas. Those were the things that would never happen [in Miami]. It’s like, if you’re going to get beat, it’s not going to be because this man lines me up and takes me and there ain’t nobody there dropping and sinking and stepping up. That’s the attitude we’re missing right now.”

Tonight in Philadelphia, the fourth game of this trip, would be a good time for them to find out.

Sixty games in the season, they still haven’t found any consistency -- other than the consistent inability to maintain anything positive.

“This team, you know what they’ve been like all year,” Hamblen said. “It’s hard for them to put streaks together; the longest we had was a three-game win streak.

“We’ve just been inconsistent all year. Obviously a new team. Maybe some guys haven’t been through a playoff stretch run.”

Grant, Caron Butler and Lamar Odom had to fight their way in with the Miami Heat last season after an 0-7 start.

“This is the same position we were in in Miami last year, and we made it happen,” said Butler, who had 20 points and 11 rebounds and sparked a brief Laker surge in the fourth quarter. “With this talent on this team, with Kobe Bryant, I feel we can do it.”

Bryant was spectacular in Charlotte Saturday, when he scored 21 points in the fourth and made the winning shot in the final second. This time he made one of 12 shots in the second half. He fired up three-pointers early in the offense and missed. He drove the lane looking for fouls and found mostly frustration -- and only one trip to the line.

The only thing the Lakers seemed to carry over from Charlotte was their abandonment of the triangle offense. They got away from it in the fourth quarter Saturday -- to great effect -- but Monday they needed more balance, more direction. They didn’t wait too long for things to break down against the Wizards, entering into an unrecognizable offense that ultimately resulted in three-pointers being launched from all over the court.

Odom was in foul trouble again, and you know what that does to his game. Chris Mihm had a bad back, which might explain why Brendan Haywood outscored him, 16-1.

Tough night all around.

“You didn’t think we’d win all six on this trip, did you?” Hamblen said.

No. But we did think they’d compete every night.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Adande, go to latimes.com/adande.