LOS ANGELES - There will be a team in their future that can guard the Lakers, maybe, but not for a week or two.

Every time the Utah Jazz lumbered its way into some sort of threatening position Wednesday night, some Laker got enough daylight to ram home another shot. It usually takes just a sliver. The window opened for Derek Fisher late in the fourth quarter, when he got a quick pass from Sasha Vujacic, stepped into a 3-pointer and, of course, made it, giving the Lakers a 10-point lead that, just a minute earlier, was five.

“Derek Fisher is a champion,” Lamar Odom declared. “When he hits shots like that you take it for granted sometimes.”

The final was 120-110, and the Lakers rose to 6-0 in the postseason and 2-0 in the Western semifinals. It has the feel of a five-game series, and another break to watch San Antonio and New Orleans shed more blood.

With each victory you sense one more stage of harmonic convergence. This time the Lakers shot 57.4 percent. The starting lineup shot 32 for 52, which is 61.5 percent. Fisher hit all but one of his five threes and scored 22, which is nothing new. Like the jacarandas, he shows up brightly in May. But, really, all the Lakers seemed to take the appropriate shot. And most of them seem to realize how rare that is.

“It’s awesome to play with a team that passes so well,” said Luke Walton, who maybe for the first time in his life isn’t the best passer on his own team. “You cut a little harder. You move a little faster. You’re looking for the ball because you know it’s coming when it should be. Everything’s in rhythm and it’s hard to express how much fun it is.”

How good were they? Utah’s Paul Millsap said, “We played pretty good defense.” And he might have been right, although Utah would be better-served by playing such defense with its feet, not hands. The Lakers piled up 43 foul shots on 30 Utah fouls. That’s 89 foul shots on 63 fouls in two games, and a plus-41 in free-throw attempts.

“I thought we had hands in their faces,” Millsap said. “We were where we were supposed to be. They made shots. That and they made free throws. When you look at all the numbers, we were right there with them in every category except foul shooting. So I know we can play with them, we can beat them.”

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They can, but only if Carlos Boozer breaks his playoff slump and Deron Williams attends both halves. Williams was 1 for 6 in the first half, a half the Lakers won by 14 points. Williams then wound up with 25 points and 10 assists, which helped Utah get to within five points but had very little cosmic relevance.

“Look at our backcourt and we’ve got about three or four years worth of experience in the starting lineup,” Utah coach Jerry Sloan said. “Look at theirs and they’ve got about 18 (actually 24 with Kobe Bryant and Fisher, who broke in together). It takes time to learn how to play this game. The first step is to keep trying and keep coming back, which is what our guys did. We had 58 points in the paint tonight (to the Lakers’ 40), but we needed to get a little extra.”

The Jazz also hit 7 of 18 three-point shots. Coming into the game, Lakers playoff opponents were hitting only 24.2 percent of their bombs, as opposed to 36.2 percent in the regular season.

“We’ve become a really good defensive team in the last few weeks,” Walton said. “We switch, we help each other. We take away one shot. We make you make another pass. We make you make another pass after that. Pretty soon you’ve got a shot, and you’ve also got somebody running at you with two or three seconds on the shot clock. It’s hard to execute like that, and that’s been a real key for us here lately.”

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Bryant celebrated his MVP-coronation night with 34 points, eight rebounds and six assists, which boosts his playoff percentage over .500. It’s clearer than ever that he was misquoted when he said last summer that he might end up playing on Pluto. He really said he was going to be playing with plutonium.

This also was one of the few nights in recorded history when Phil Jackson was sincerely happy to see David Stern. The NBA commissioner is always welcome during playoff time because, more likely than not, he’s in town to present the Most Valuable Player trophy.

And so he was, standing next to Bryant at midcourt with his patented everything-is-beautiful grin.

Bryant’s teammates joined him when he picked up the trophy, with high-fives for everyone, as the two-day Kobepalooza came to its promised end.

And, everywhere you went, you were invited to review this incredible journey, from mocking parking-lot videos to Mount Rushmore in about 10 months.

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