Same old defenseless Lakers

The Lakers who lost tonight to Chris Paul and the Clippers by 114-95 looked a lot like the team that got bounced from the playoffs in the second round by the eventual champion Dallas Mavericks last May. They were slow and didn't play adequate defense.

New coach Mike Brown noticed. "It was an ugly game for us," he said

Brown was especially upset about the Lakers' inability to cover the perimeter.

"Lack of focus and lack of effort," he said. "If we had more timeouts, I would have used them all. I wanted to call timeouts because of all the uncontested shots we gave up. We didn't do our job, which was to get better tonight. We took a step backwards."

Brown did not spare Kobe Bryant in his postgame critique.

"Kobe was just as guilty as everybody else in not contesting shots," Brown said.