Tonight is the final game before the highly anticipated Christmas Day game agains the Boston Celtics.

This four game road trip has been disastorous and not a single fan can be happy how it’s gone. The trip started off with back to back losses in Florida to the Heat and the Magic. After a day off the Lakers faced the Memphis Grizzlies last night and were barely able to pull out a win.

To me, a huge fan, it’s become completely absurd that we went from being excited about 30 point wins one after another to being excited about barely beating the New York Knicks and the Memphis Grizzlies. It’s quite simple, if the Lakers want to prove that they are already competitive, they must blow out the New Orleans Hornets tonight on their own home court and then play a big game agains the Celtics on Thursday coming away with a big win.

The Lakers have already beaten the Hornets once this season and look to take a 2-0 season series lead. With a slightly slower schedule, Chris Paul has likely been licking his chops preparing for this game. The Lakers will have some issues tonight matching up as Jordan Farmar is once again out of the lineup and Derek Fisher is the only true point guard. It will be interesting to see if Sun Yue gets the chance to show off his skills or if Sasha Vujacic will be assigned to defend Paul.

Either way you look at it, the regular season is all about progressing, learning, and improving. Statement games are important but its more improtant that we see good signs from the team as a unit and from each individual player as well. Unfortunately, the last few weeks have left us little to be happy about. After starting the season with the best record of 14-1, the Lakers have now lost 4 of their last 12 games. 8-4 is not bad, but for a team competing for the NBA title and tryign to hold home court advantage throughout the playoffs, which is what proved to be fatal last season in Boston, the Lakers aren’t doing enough.

Hopefully we will see some good signs of life tonight from this Lakers team so that we have something to be excited about going into this matchup with the champs on Christmas Day.