Horry Closer to Returning but May Not Play Tonight

Robert Horry is getting closer to a “meaningful situation,” but it doesn’t figure to be in tonight’s game against the Milwaukee Bucks.

Horry’s status will be weighed again before the game, but even if he were to play, it would be lightly, for a few minutes, in the least pressured circumstances Coach Del Harris could find for him.

“If [team doctors] want him to play and he wants to play, then it’s a decision I make to find a non-meaningful situation in a game, or a less meaningful situation in a game,” Harris said.

“Then I would slot him in a few minutes and just get him going a little bit. There’s no guarantee I can find a non-meaningful situation, so even if the green lights were totally on, he may or may not play.”

Not all the green lights are on yet. Despite optimistic updates suggesting Horry would return tonight, the patient, himself, was cautioned Monday by team orthopedist Stephen Lombardo to take it slowly.

Harris arranged a special walk-through for Horry on Tuesday and Horry, playing with a thigh-to-calf brace protecting his sprained left knee, said he felt fine but doesn’t expect to play until next week.

“The doc was like, ‘Hey, let’s just take this thing easy,’ “Horry said. “ . . . Hopefully, I can be back for the Seattle game [next Tuesday] and get those four good days of practice in.”

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Since Horry left and losses began mounting, it has been an unspoken assumption around the Lakers that they would fall to fourth in the West, obliging them to play the charging Portland Trail Blazers in the first round of the playoffs.

However, the Houston Rockets, who moved ahead of them March 8, have slipped, so it’s still a race.

“I thought it would be a struggle to stay ahead of [the Rockets] when Robert went down,” Harris said. “But I didn’t know they were going to get hit with injuries too, so we caught a little break there.”

The Lakers are still the underdogs, however. The Rockets hold the tiebreaker, having won the season series, 3-1, and their schedule is easier than the Lakers’.

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The Lakers are 11-10 since Shaquille O’Neal went out--9-9 since Horry joined him--but Harris thinks they’ve held up well enough.

“I feel good about the way the guys have held together,” he said. “Yeah, there have been some moments where maybe a thing or two was said out of frustration that was better not said. But we go around to these other towns and read what’s going on it in those cities, we’ve done all right, haven’t we?

“We don’t have anybody in jail or anybody fighting each other. Guys still speak to me.”