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LeBron James’ injury in loss to Pelicans could be the biggest Lakers collapse of all

It didn’t seem like much could hurt more than the loss itself. But then LeBron James limped into the interview room, sat behind a folding table, cupped his face in his right hand, and said this: “I have no idea how I finished the game.”

The injury? “Pretty nasty,” he said.

The pain? “Horrible.”

Don’t Lakers fans know it.

They surely felt it, too, when, amid a torrential scoring burst from James early in the second quarter, the 37-year-old landed on the foot of New Orleans’ forward Jaxson Hayes. Before he hit the floor, his left ankle bent at a 90-degree angle and the Lakers’ momentum did a 180.

Some season, huh?

James writhed on the floor, then retied his shoe, staying in the game. But he wasn’t the same. His explosiveness disappeared. He relied on deep 3-pointers. And when those stopped falling, the 23-point lead the Lakers built behind James’ determination evaporated.

New Orleans 116, Lakers 108.

You probably already know what that means: The stakes were well established. The Pelicans jumped the Lakers in the standings, leaving LeBron & Co. clinging to the 10-seed by a single game over the San Antonio Spurs.

“Time’s running out on us,” Frank Vogel said.

Strike up the brass band and cue a Cajun dirge. It’s a wonder the team bus wasn’t followed to the airport by a second line.

The Lakers have hung on to the faintest hope of a late-season revival, but now the one thing they had going for them will spend the next 48 hours working around the clock just to get ready to play on Tuesday night in Dallas.

The guy who took nearly a full week to prepare for Sunday’s game due to ongoing soreness in his left knee now has a bum ankle. Hard to imagine that won’t be a factor the rest of the season.

“I hate missing games,” he said. “That’s not in my nature.”

It’s fair to wonder how much more James has left to give, especially if it’s not yielding results. Even if Sunday’s injury proves not to have broken him physically, it might have emotionally.

The dejected James admitted that he likely would not have stayed on the court Sunday if this had just been one of 82 regular-season games, and not the high-stakes affair that the Lakers readily admitted it was.

A hobbled, heroic James gave the Lakers everything he could and it still wasn’t enough to prevent them from suffering the kind of disappointment they have turned into an art form this season.

“It feels like shit,” James said. “I mean, excuse my language, but that’s what it feels like.”

Facing the team they were trying to hold off in the standings, a team whose motto is “won’t bow down,” the Lakers bent, folded and crumbled.

Won’t bow down, they say. Don’t know how.

The Lakers are masters of the craft.

They are now 31-43 — Sunday, somehow, was only their second-biggest blown lead of the season — and falling out of the Play-In picture before Anthony Davis can return to action is now a distinct possibility.

Since the All-Star break, the Lakers have undergone a dramatic transformation, relying on late arrivals like Stanley Johnson, D.J. Augustin and Wenyen Gabriel rather than the collection of veterans the Lakers assembled in the offseason.

Wins remained scarce, but they were at least putting up credible performances. They won in Toronto in thrilling fashion, and James carried them to victory in Cleveland.

Slowly but surely, the Lakers were establishing an identity.

And when they raced out to a 23-point lead in the second quarter on Sunday, it seemed like the continuation of that positive mojo. Maybe the Lakers had found a groove that would at least carry them into the Play-In and give them that glimmer of hope.

Please.

“We are who we are,” James said.

With one loss — and their next two games against Western Conference heavyweights Dallas and Utah — they are now facing the prospect of returning to New Orleans to face the Pelicans in the Play-In, if they can even get there.

“It hurts,” Vogel said. “This one hurts. This was a big game.”

It was, and James played like it. He scored 11 points in the first quarter and by halftime, even after rolling his ankle, had upped that to 25. The Lakers led by 20.

But then their defense got cooked by Brandon Ingram. The Lakers watched as the centerpiece of their package for Anthony Davis, and the former heir to Kobe Bryant’s corner locker, poured in 26 points while Davis remains sidelined with a sprained foot.

The Lakers and Pelicans play again at the end of the week. But New Orleans now owns the tiebreaker. They have the upper hand.

And after a night like Sunday, when the Lakers could look so marvelous in one half and so hapless in the next, it’s hard to understand what all of this is for. Even if they can hang on to a spot in the Play-In, Ingram and the Pelicans would likely be waiting for them.

And if they survived that, they would need to win another road game just to get to the buzzsaw that is the top-seeded Phoenix Suns in the first round.

In the end, there was nothing all that special about the Lakers’ loss to the Pelicans. It was another loss that fit perfectly into their identity.

“All of them suck, man,” Malik Monk said. “All the losses like this suck.”

When James’ ankle buckled underneath him on Sunday it felt like the moment that might signal the end of the Lakers season.

Believing that, however, would mean that you were still indulging the fantasy that it wasn’t already over.