Lakers Win Despite a Return to Old Habits

With the Lakers, it’s hard to tell if the blinding white light is a flash of brilliance or the lightning of an approaching storm.

As well as they played last week in their poundings of Sacramento and Minnesota, Sunday’s narrow victory over the Utah Jazz brought another round of questioning Coach Phil Jackson’s rotation and Kobe Bryant’s shot selection.

They said all the right things in the locker room, where the quotes carried the same tune of Gary Payton’s “We’re still rolling, we’re still winning games.”

But perhaps a truer statement was made by the silence emanating from Shaquille O’Neal’s empty chair, and in the hallway, where one Laker said “It’ll be amazing if we win this.”

As recently as Thursday, O’Neal said he was happy to play a rebounding and defending role as long as the Lakers were winning. Those of you who have been following the Laker follies long enough know better.

He didn’t appear happy after a low volume of touches Sunday, resulting in only 11 points (four for 11 from the field, three for 10 from the line) and no assists. And he didn’t care to stick around and talk about it.

This was supposed to be Karl Malone’s day to finally play against his old team after a suspension and an injury kept him out of the Lakers’ first three games with the Jazz.

He wound up having to fight and scrap his way to the free-throw line to collect 19 points to go with his 13 rebounds.

Bryant set about trying to win it for him -- not with him. After two scintillating weeks of all-around team ball, this was a long night of solo action. Bryant wound up taking 23 shots (missing 15) and 21 free throws.

The crowd cheered all of his 34 points, chanted MVP for his final free-throw attempts. The Lakers gritted their teeth.

“We were trying to convince him about drawing the defense and moving the ball,” Jackson said.

The Lakers are still trying to convince Jackson that they need more time on the floor together. Jackson wants to keep everyone involved and his older players fresh. That formula is working for Hubie Brown and his 10-man rotation in Memphis, but it’s a recipe for trouble with the players with Hall of Fame credentials (and attendant egos) in L.A.

Jackson has spoke of finding minutes for Derek Fisher because he didn’t want to “lose” him, but he might have lost Payton in the process. Kareem Rush might have responded early to Jackson’s confidence in him -- and played well when forced to fill in during Bryant’s absences -- but Rush has made more than one field goal in a game only once since March 10.

On Sunday it was 34 minutes for Malone, 33 for Payton and a fourth-quarter starting lineup of Bryant, Fisher, Rush, Luke Walton and Slava Medvedenko. That group saw the Lakers’ 14-point lead cut down to six before O’Neal checked back in. The Jazz forged a tie, with Bryant coming out midway through that run.

That forced Jackson to answer the pleas of the clamoring fans and send the starting lineup back on the court with 5:16 left in the game.

Jackson said he was “experimenting.”

He added: “I wanted to see a couple of different lineups, what it looked like -- there’s an outside chance we could meet Utah [in the playoffs] -- see how some players played against their personnel.”

Jackson sometimes doesn’t appear disturbed about losing a regular-season game if there is some greater lesson to be learned for the playoffs, but the Lakers are locked in a tight battle for home-court advantage and can’t afford any of what O’Neal would call “slippage.”

In some ways the Laker starters were safer on the bench. It was rough out there. Malone had a scare with his injured knee when he went to the floor in the third, then had to get X-rays on his right hand that he banged during the game. He also took a shot to the face on a flagrant foul from old hunting buddy Greg Ostertag. (“I owe Oster for that one,” Malone said).

Rick Fox caught a wayward shot from Malone and had to check to make sure his teeth were still in place. Someone joked with Fox that he could have used a mouthpiece.

“Or a helmet, right?” he said.

It wasn’t only because of the physical play that the Lakers lost some of their offensive rhythm, the all-around, everyone-involved game that they were building. They had only 12 assists Sunday, a season low, one-on-one play replacing any other priority.

“We got it in our mind that we wanted to score on people instead of stopping them,” Malone said.

Payton did manage to get his 8,000th assist on a fastbreak pass to Fox, a milestone that public-address announcer Lawrence Tanter shared with the crowd when the Lakers returned from a timeout. He joins John Stockton, Mark Jackson, Magic Johnson and Oscar Robertson as the only players to reach that level.

The way the Lakers played Sunday, they should have stopped the game and made an announcement any time they got an assist at all.

But you looked up at the end of the game and the Lakers had a 91-84 victory, an eight-game winning streak and the second-best record in the Western Conference.

Maybe Jackson’s experimenting will end, and Bryant will resume his standout play that kept everyone else involved.

“It’s just one game,” Payton said. “It happened.”

The Lakers just can’t afford to make it a habit.

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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.