"Those were the good old days," Derek Fisher said, chuckling.

Blown leads are suddenly the least of the Lakers' concerns after they opened the second round of the playoffs with a stunning home loss to Houston on Monday night. If they don't avenge that defeat tonight at Staples Center, the Lakers will fall into a precipitous 2-0 hole heading back to Houston for Games 3 and 4.

While the Lakers insist they're confident they'll even the series tonight and reassert their status atop the Western Conference hierarchy, they also concede the stakes are higher than any game they've played this season. Less than 7 percent of NBA teams who have fallen behind 2-0 in a best-of-seven rallied back to win the series.

"It's a good test," Kobe Bryant said. "I for one am anxious to see how we respond. I think last year we had a cakewalk to the NBA Finals. It feels good to be tested a little bit. If you're going to be champion, you have to answer those bells."

It's no surprise the Lakers remain resolutely optimistic because Monday's ragged offensive performance still nearly resulted in a victory. They held a brief fourth-quarter lead despite shooting 2 for 18 from three-point range, getting minimal contributions from Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom and relying on Bryant to bail them out with his jump shot.

Practice on Tuesday was routine and businesslike, with no punitive run-until-you-drop drills nor fire-and-brimstone speeches. Instead Phil Jackson emphasized normalcy, focusing on getting his team's offense back in sync and tightening up some of the blunders in defensive rotation that hurt them late in the game.

"We're not happy about losing, there's no doubt about that, but the sky is not falling," Jackson said. "You guys can do that for us if you want, but we're not at that level. We're not ready to pack up and go home yet."

Where the coaches believe the Lakers lost Monday's game is by deserting the tenets of the triangle offense too quickly. Once they fell behind early and their outside shots stopped dropping, patience and crisp passing disappeared from the Lakers' offense and they became too reliant on Bryant.

Worse yet, Bryant had minimal success getting to the rim or the free-throw line against Shane Battier and Houston's array of help defenders. He scored a game-high 32 points on 14-for-31 shooting, but 26 of those shots were jumpers and Bryant reached the free-throw line just once until the final three minutes.

"As well as teams play defense in this league, the ball has to change sides of the floor," Lakers assistant Jim Cleamons said. "Anytime the ball gets locked in on one side of the floor, the defense becomes more like a zone. Now you don't have ball movement so that zone doesn't shift and you have five pairs of eyes locked onto whoever has the Basketball and he's trying to literally beat five guys by himself."

Committing 26 fouls to allow the Rockets to shoot 29 free throws is the area the Lakers would like to clean up defensively. They also felt some of Yao Ming's effectiveness in a 12-point fourth quarter was a result of their inability to take advantage of his suspect conditioning by speeding up the tempo or making him work defensively in the post.

"We've just got to make him work so he loses effectiveness," Gasol said. "That's something we didn't do well as a team."

NOTES

After sitting out Monday's game with a left ankle injury, Luke Walton conducted a hard workout during Tuesday's practice and pronounced himself fit to play.