Lakers chatter

Some notable quotes from the Lakers' practice this morning at the TD Banknorth Garden:

Lakers guard Kobe Bryant:

The whole Paul Pierce drama last night, how did that whole thing affect you guys?

"Paul Pierce drama (laughing). I don't think it affected us at all. He's a good friend. The thing that I was concerned with was his health and making sure he was Okay. But I don't think it had much of an effect on us. I was happy to see him come out there until he made those two damn threes."

What kind of adjustments do you have to make in your game when you go from having Ray Allen guard you to having Posey guard you to having Pierce guard you in the course of a game?

"Not much really. Their principles are the same. They just want to contest shots. If I go up and shoot, just get a hand in the face. I've just got to put the ball in the damn hole. That sucker didn't want to stay down last game.

Would you say that Boston probably has defended you better than most teams this year? What is it that they've done that you're shooting like 35 percent or so against them this season? What is it that they do that makes it hard?

"Just making me a perimeter player in terms of being able to shoot the ball. Two games we played in the regular season, I shot the ball atrociously. In Game 1 I shot the ball bad, too. Hopefully it just means I'm due."

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Lakers center Pau Gasol:

With Paul Pierce and Perkins kind of dinged up a little bit, how does that affect you guys in the front court?

"Well, I don't know, we'll see. We're not going to rely on them not being 100 percent. We've just got to be focused on ourselves being 100 percent and being tuned in in everything we do out there, executing, rebounding, defending, setting ourselves up early and keeping the tone for 48 minutes. I think that's the bottom line. We're not going to rely on their players not being healthy 100 percent. We're just going to make sure we come out with the right mentality and the right approach in Game 2, and make sure we're aggressive, we start aggressive and we continue to be aggressive for 48 minutes. I think that's how we're going to be able to win the game."

On that subject, offensively, do you plan to attack more aggressively? The Celtics sort of seem to collapse down low?

"We all have to be aggressive. We all have to execute our plays, exercise a lot of options. So if they take away our first and second options, we have a lot of guys out there that can score and knock down jumpers. We've just got to make sure we execute and we move the ball and we share the ball, like we did more so in the first half than in the second half. And obviously be aggressive and try to get in the lane as much as we can.

But like I said, we know how to do it. We just got away from doing it a little bit when things didn't go our way in Game 1. And like I said, if we control the little things, that's going to make a difference because that's not going to put so much pressure on our offense and our execution down the stretch. So that's going to make things better if we control better the boards and would have gotten a few more loose balls that would have been, I think, a different look for us."

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Lakers coach Phil Jackson:

Some people were calling last night a Willis Reed moment. Did it go through your mind at all when you saw Pierce come back? And just a memory of that night, because you were there that night?

"Well, if I'm not mistaken, I think Willis Reed missed a whole half and three quarters almost of a game and literally had to have a shot, a horse shot, three or four of them in his thigh to come back out and play. Paul got carried off and was back on his feet in a minute. I don't know if the angels visited him at halftime or in that time-out period that he had or not, but he didn't even limp when he came back out on the floor. I don't know what was going on there (laughter). Was Oral Roberts back there in their locker room? (laughter) But he certainly carried some energy back on the floor for them.

Three games against the Celtics this year, Kobe struggled in each. Do you attribute that to what they're doing defensively? Or with Kobe is it just Kobe, is it whatever he's doing that game and that's the result?

"It certainly has something to do with it. The defense is there. He didn't get to the basket, he didn't get to the foul line. Foul shots are really important for scoring, and again, they eliminated a lot of his ability to get to the foul line. So there's some things they did very well.

But as we all saw, there was a lot of shots there that just didn't go down for him that were in and out. So that's a matter of understanding his baskets, getting a touch on them and figuring it out."