“You don’t get too high on one win because you have to come back and play again,” James cautioned Sunday after the victory in New Orleans. “…Tuesday’s game is going to be extremely hard, extremely difficult, extremely physical. I’ve always known that, when you play a playoff series — and I look at this like a two-game playoff series — if you win that first game, a team has multiple days to kind of sit on that feeling, or sit with that taste in their mouth of defeat. So they’re going to be extremely ready for us and we have to come in with the same sense of urgency that we had the previous game.”

The Lakers, though, have good reasons to feel positive about where they are. They’d won nine of 10 games before illness and injury kept them from being whole in losses against Minnesota and Golden State. They stumbled in an ugly win Friday before cruising Sunday.

“You could just feel the vibe when we did our walk-through yesterday at the hotel,” coach Darvin Ham said Sunday. “We watched film. A lot of guys were disappointed in the way we kind of didn’t completely drop the rope by some mistakes we made in that Memphis game. Just trying to make sure we’re as tight as possible on both sides of the ball in terms of our execution. So we wanted to come out early and set a tone defensively. And also set a tone offensively by not settling. Defensively, giving multiple efforts.”

At the foreground was James, who took the responsibility of guarding Williamson.

“I just want to win so whatever the game presents itself for me to be, if it needs me to be more attacking and scoring range, or if it needs me to be more of a set-up guy, if it needs me to be more of a defender, I got to do it all,” James said. “I am a Swiss Army knife so I got to do it all on the floor and none of it’s predetermined.”

The only thing they can, the Lakers have said, control is the game in front of them. And when it comes to tempting fate beyond that, the Lakers can’t risk anything.

“Up-and-down season,” Anthony Davis said. “We had our highs. We had our lows. We had our share of injuries. Like I said, 12 games over .500. Obviously we don’t want to be in this position, but we are. We’re gonna make the best of it one at a time starting Tuesday.”

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