Talk about a tale of two locker rooms. I stopped by the Suns locker room after the game and it was fairly dreary in there. Shaquille O’Neal tried to lighten the mood, but most of the Suns players dressed quickly and exited as soon as possible.

“This was a good test for us,” O’Neal said. “Obviously we failed the test tremendously.”

Down the hall in the Lakers dressing room, things were jovial by comparison. Jovial, but businesslike.

It was obvious the team had known it needed to blitz Phoenix early in order to be ready for tommorrow’s game in Denver.

“Tonight kinda felt like a trap game. We’re at home, Steve (Nash) is out. It kinda seemed like a game we could’ve taken the night off,” Kobe Bryant said. “So we wanted to make sure from the (opening) jump that we didn’t do that.”