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Times Staff Writer

With time running out on their season, the Lakers assembled for practice Monday morning and experienced a much shorter session than expected.

Phil Jackson gathered the team in the video room, showed a brief clip from the movie “Hustle & Flow,” and bluntly informed the players that they absolutely didn’t hustle on defense and showed little or no flow on offense in their Game 4 loss to Phoenix.

Then he sent them home to ponder the 3-1 deficit they’ve created for themselves.

In other words, they might want to start hustling or else they’ll flow right out of the playoffs.

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Practice will resume today, presumably, at the team training facility in El Segundo. Game 5 is Wednesday in Phoenix, when the Lakers’ season could very well come to a close.

The tale of two Game 4s was all that needed to be studied to see the differences in last season’s series against the Suns.

A year ago, Staples Center rocked and rolled as Smush Parker had a key steal of Steve Nash and Luke Walton then tied up Nash near halfcourt, followed by Kobe Bryant’s hitting buzzer-beaters at the end of regulation and in overtime of a 99-98 victory.

On Sunday, Nash piled up a near-playoff-record 23 assists and Lakers fans filed out quietly as the Suns won, 113-100.

From 3-1 to 1-3 through four games.

“Last night was not easy to face their friends and family,” said Jackson, the lone voice of the Lakers after he sent everybody home early. “I told them to bring their energy back and play a basketball game. We were out-hustled. They had more energy on the floor than we did. They imposed their will on the game and we never recovered.”

An overwhelming majority of NBA teams don’t recover from such series deficits.

Only eight teams in NBA history have come back to win a series after trailing, 3-1, and only two of those teams were lower-seeded teams that faced two more road games: Boston against Philadelphia in the 1968 Eastern Conference finals and Houston against Phoenix in the 1995 Western Conference semifinals.

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The bright spot, if there was one in the Lakers’ camp, was the relative health of Lamar Odom, whose hyperextended left elbow didn’t feel any worse for the wear after he played 35 minutes in Sunday’s game.

“Lamar feels a lot better today, even after the [game] activity,” Jackson said. “I was very worried in the first half that he wasn’t involved in the ballgame and couldn’t make a shot. It didn’t look like he wanted to take a shot. He got himself involved in the game in the third quarter.”

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Bryant was selected to the NBA All-Defensive team for a seventh time, a somewhat surprising development given his struggles on defense for part of the season.

“Kobe has improved his defense the second half of the season and we’re happy that he made the first-team All-Defensive team,” Jackson said. “But you’ve got to live up to that. That’s really important. When he puts his mind up to the defense, he’s done a great job for us.

“We’ve talked a lot about it, not being able to do the same things he’s done in the past like steals, stopping guys or blocking shots in key situations like he’s done when he was younger. We want him to get back and focus on that.”

Bryant has done a decent job on Raja Bell in the first round, holding the Suns guard to 7.3 points a game, less than half of his season average.

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Other All-Defensive team selections included Bell, San Antonio forwards Tim Duncan and Bruce Bowen and Denver center Marcus Camby.

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The Golden State Warriors, who had the same 42-40 record as the Lakers during the regular season, couldn’t help but be noticed by Jackson as they pushed Dallas to the brink of playoff elimination.

“That was a remarkable game [Sunday] night,” Jackson said. “Great game, tremendous crowd in Oakland.

“I thought Dallas kept fighting back, but couldn’t get over that energy that the crowd and those Warriors put out there on the floor. That was quite a game.”

mike.bresnahan@latimes.com

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

All-NBA defense

FIRST TEAM

*--* Player Position Team KOBE BRYANT GUARD LAKERS Raja Bell guard Phoenix Bruce Bowen forward San Antonio Tim Duncan forward San Antonio Marcus Camby center Denver

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*--*

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* The second team: Chicago’s Ben Wallace and Kirk Hinrich, New Jersey’s Jason Kidd, Detroit’s Tayshaun Prince and Minnesota’s Kevin Garnett.

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