Given Unfinished Business, They’ll Usually Take Care of It

So the Lakers expelled their Game 5 demons, found themselves another last-second stud, won a playoff game in San Antonio and poured enough fluids into their All-NBA swingman to swamp a good-sized practice court.

By Friday afternoon, the Team LA stores at Universal City Walk and Staples Center had sold out of Derek Fisher jerseys, the Spurs had lost their appeal of the final tenths of a second and Kobe Bryant was up and around, if something less than spry.

All of which left ... Game 6.

The Lakers can eliminate the Spurs tonight at Staples Center, on the same date and at the same site the Spurs eliminated the Lakers a year ago.

The parallel story lines persist, Robert Horry apparently having bequeathed his mojo to Fisher, Fisher making his shot on the same end of the floor where Horry missed last season, the Lakers standing now about where the Spurs did.

They lead the best-of-seven Western Conference semifinals, three games to two, in five days having reached the verge of the conference finals by 1) reviving Shaquille O’Neal in one game; 2) having Bryant score 42 points hours after pleading not guilty to felony sexual assault in another; and 3) having Fisher knock down the shot of his life, and a few other lives, in the last.

It appears the two-games-to-none deficit was less death knell than opening bell, though the Lakers nearly lost that momentum by scoring 13 points over the final 16 minutes of Game 5. These things happen, and the Lakers held up, if barely, and barely counts this time of year.

Everybody enjoyed the moment for Fisher, a solid company man who gave up plenty when Gary Payton arrived, and did it quietly. Bryant spoke for them all when he said, “It couldn’t have happened to a better dude,” and the comparisons to Horry’s Sacramento King killer flew.

The thing is, Horry’s three-point basket not only won a game, it saved a season and led the Lakers to a championship, his shot in Game 4 of the conference finals becoming emblematic of that 2002 title run and perhaps their entire three-peat.

So Fisher showed up to work Friday wearing a maroon T-shirt with his college team, Arkansas Little Rock, advertised on the front, back to his roots.

“Part of me is still holding on to the fact that we still have a lot to do,” he said. “As good as it feels right now, with us trying to go out and close out the series [tonight], if that does happen for us, we still have a long way to go to win a championship.”

These Lakers aren’t yet out of the second round, but they have a knack for these moments. They have won 10 consecutive close-out games. At home, they’ve won five in a row and are 7-1 under Coach Phil Jackson. But, Fisher said, these Spurs are a special kind of out.

“Once you become a champion, there’s a different type of attitude you carry about yourself,” he said. “There’s a different type of pride you bring in. So I think for us to beat them [tonight], we’re not going to have to play a perfect game. We’re not going to have to do everything correctly.... It’s not going to be about the fear of going back to San Antonio or if we go to a Game 7 we can’t win. It’s just going to be about actually wanting it more, knowing we deserve to be in this position. And playing that way.... It’ll be about desire.”

Asked to explain their recent successes at finishing series, Jackson said, “I don’t know. I think it’s really the determination a team has, the knowledge they acquire.... This team does better the longer they stay on the court with each other.”

Jackson said he believes the Lakers are playing their best defense of the season; the Spurs have scored more than 90 points only once in the series, and Tim Duncan and Tony Parker aren’t what they were in the series’ first two games.

Now the Lakers have their second three-game winning streak of the season against the Spurs, the streaks separated by five months and all of the usual anxiety. It is how the Lakers endure, their issues separated by phenomena that fall from the sky and make them smile and laugh.

In the previous night’s postgame celebration in their small locker room, Horace Grant cut his lip. The back of somebody’s head. An elbow. He couldn’t remember.

“First guy,” Kurt Rambis said, “to get hurt while on the injured list.”

Grant touched the small red fleck above his mouth and considered the shot, and then put it in a legend’s company.

“Michael made a lot of shots, of course,” Grant said of Jordan, his former teammate with the Chicago Bulls. “But a shot like that, right there, Derek Fisher, with oh-point-four seconds, a guy who’s persevered, I’m like drained.

“Me and Fish, we talked all the way through the season. I kept telling him, ‘Be patient. Don’t lose your cool.’ It’s fortunate for him, fortunate for us. A great moment. A great time.”