Lakers not worried about Suns putting the rap on them

If the Lakers are nervous, they’re not showing it.

If they’re worried about Steve Nash, Amare Stoudemire, Shawn Marion and a quick playoff exit at the hands of the Phoenix Suns, it’s not overly obvious.

How can it be, when their coach quotes an Oscar-winning song from a movie about a struggling Memphis pimp who attempts to forge a rap career?

“It’s hard out here for a pimp,” Phil Jackson said, evoking laughter from more than a dozen media members Friday at the team’s training facility in El Segundo.

Jackson had his reasons for referring to the movie “Hustle & Flow,” his choice this year to intersperse among game video clips in the days leading up to Sunday’s tipoff of another Lakers-Suns first-round series.

Last year before the playoffs, Jackson spliced cuts of the movie “Inside Man” into video sessions, a nod to the importance of getting the ball down low to Kwame Brown against the undersized Suns. This year’s theme was more general, “to get the essence of the message of work, and not stopping, and the idea of the underdog kind of role too in that situation,” Jackson said.

Underdogs the Lakers are, with oddsmakers calling them 11-1 longshots to win the series.

But if they needed any motivation to snap out of a 4-8 finish in the final few weeks, they found it from their opponents, with Stoudemire saying last week the Suns would “take care of them pretty quick” and with players reading passages from an all-access book about last season’s Suns and their unflattering views of the Lakers.

Copies of an article from Friday’s edition of The Times were passed out to select Lakers who were disparaged by the Suns in the book “:07 Seconds or Less,” written by Sports Illustrated reporter Jack McCallum and published last fall.

The Times article included numerous passages from the book, including a quote from Suns Coach Mike D’Antoni in which he said, “Kwame [Brown] is awful. [Lamar] Odom’s a very average defender. [Sasha] Vujacic can’t guard anybody. And [Kobe] Bryant in the open floor takes chances that aren’t good.”

Bryant arrived at practice with a scowl and was short-sentenced afterward with the media. When asked if he was surprised by the rhetoric from the Phoenix camp, he deferred.

“I’m not surprised or anything like that,” he said. “I don’t have any sentiment one way or another. I don’t think anybody was really paying any particular attention to it.”

Odom said he was concentrating more on the fact that the Lakers lost a 3-1 lead last season, letting the Suns become only the eighth team in league history to win a series after facing such a deficit.

It was Jordan Farmar, the rookie who will probably start against two-time NBA most valuable player Nash, who came up with the greatest insight into what the Lakers are feeling.

“I think it should bother you in a good way,” he said. “I think it should get under your skin a little bit and bring out that competitive nature, that dog in everybody, a little feistiness. Because you know when someone doesn’t respect you, you want to earn their respect. You want to prove that you can play and that you’re not what they claim and say you are.”

Jackson also showed a less walled-off approach.

“They’re a team that’s won their division three times in a row,” he said of the Suns. “They still haven’t gotten to that final step to get to the Finals ... but they’re a confident team and it shows. You’ve got to give them some respect for that. After we get into the series, all that rhetoric, we’ll see how well that holds up.”

The Suns don’t think their words should be so motivational.

“What are they going to do, play harder?” D’Antoni told reporters in Phoenix. “I’ve never really believed in that, because I’ve played, and if the guy says you can’t do it, I was going to play as hard as I could anyway. This is the playoffs.

“The book, especially.... I think everybody knows how we feel about Kobe, especially after the playoffs, and how good he is or how good Odom is or how good Luke Walton is or how good all these guys are. We know that.”

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Bryant averaged 23 points in the Lakers’ first four playoff games last season before scoring 29, 50 and 24 in the last three games, all losses.

Will he be an aggressor or more of a passer this time around?

“We were watching Game No. 3 [from last season] and he had nine points in a situation where we were 10 points up in the fourth quarter,” Jackson said. “So we do know that we’re capable of beating this team without having to have Kobe be the primary scorer. Still, in the finish of games, he’s got to be the primary guy that we attack with.”

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The Lakers didn’t play Friday, but they lost a minor battle.

The NBA conducted random drawings to determine tiebreakers for the draft order among teams that finished with identical records. The Lakers lost their tiebreaker with Golden State, meaning the Warriors will select 18th and the Lakers 19th on June 28.

The Lakers also have two second-round picks: theirs (48th) and Charlotte’s, which will be 38th, 39th or 40th, depending on another series of tiebreakers.

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Playoff roster sizes this year have been expanded from 13 to 15 players, with each team designating 12 active players and three inactive players before each game. In the past, teams had to submit 13-man rosters to the league before the playoffs, which meant two players per team would be ineligible for the entire postseason.

The Lakers are expected to put Shammond Williams, Aaron McKie and Chris Mihm on their inactive list for Game 1.

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mike.bresnahan@latimes.com