Here’s Pau Gasol speaking today about the Lakers’ play of late: “We’re just not very consistent. We have too many ups and downs. We want to be playing our ‘A’ game at this point in the season, or getting very close to it. We have to work really hard in the next 10 days before the playoffs to get to that level.”

Here’s Derek Fisher: “We’ve really had very few times where we’ve played more than one half of good basketball, and I say that in terms of total 24 minutes, not like a whole half. It’s been just totally inconsistent. … It’s the most frustrating thing of all. As you guys (reporters) so gracefully pointed out, even when we were winning games, we still weren’t playing very well.”