Well, their defense could have been better in Sunday’s 118-108 win over Sacramento, but the bottom line was that they won again and improved their record to 11-1.

Veteran guard Derek Fisher did what a veteran is supposed to do after practice, lending some perspective to tamp down talk about the Lakers’ allegedly poor play during their win over the Kings. He told reporters after Monday’s practice:

“Winning has that ability to shift the focus toward team and it takes all the talk about individual stuff out of it, even though guys might go through struggles and ups and downs, you still get back to the point where you say, ‘We’re 11-1, who cares?’

“Nobody is going to hang his head down about his individual performance when your team is winning at the percentage we are. There’s an old saying that winning covers a multitude of sins. It does. It’s not until you lose and all of a sudden you’re the worst team in the world and this guy stinks and he can’t shoot and he can’t play defense and you suck at pick-and-roll defense, and all that stuff that comes out when you lose a game. But what we’d like to do is have that conversation be only every eight or nine. Eight or nine? Maybe we drop one, go ahead and talk about us, we’ll run off some more and we’ll try to get it back.”