  Los Angeles Lakers Kobe Bryant goes up to shoot past Toronto Raptors Hedo Turkoglu in Los Angeles, March 9, 2010. (Reuters)
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LOS ANGELES — Right with them, step for step, for the bulk of the evening, the Raptors had no answer when Kobe Bryant stepped on the gas.
With the Raptors' lead at five and about seven minutes remaining, Bryant took the game over. He scored 14 of the final 20 Lakers points, going through first Antoine Wright, then Sonny Weems and finally Jarrett Jack to do so as the Lakers beat the Raptors 109-107.
Bryant wound up with 32 points on the night on 11-of-20 shooting and if any of his teammates were complaining about him being a volume shooter after this one, they were doing it awfully quietly.
Bryant had been hearing it from a few teammates — Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom specifically — about being a little shot-happy the last little while. Not surprisingly, the chirping didn't come to light until the Lakers were on a three-game losing skid.
With 19 seconds left, the Raptors trailed by three points because Odom missed his second of two free throws. A timeout and a Chris Bosh three-pointer, his second of the game no less, tied it with nine seconds left and briefly, the Raptors were contemplating overtime. It looked like a huge shot until Bryant came down and hit his seventh game-winner of the season with 1.9 seconds left.
Defensively, the Raptors got back to what they had been doing when they made that push from mid-December through to the all-star break. Shots were contested, help was provided and stops were made. If there was a weakness it was inside, where Gasol and Andrew Bynum had their way most of the night.
And, of course, there was little they could do with Bryant once he decided to take things in his own hands.
Still, it was a far cry from the layup line that the Raptors allowed the last time they were on the road in Houston and Oklahoma City or even the 55.6% shooting success the visiting Philadelphia 76ers enjoyed on Sunday.
Hedo Turkoglu's recovering left ankle didn't turn out to be a limiting factor because foul trouble did that for him. Turkoglu was on the bench with two fouls eight minutes into the game and had four and was back on the bench midway through the third quarter.
All of Turkoglu's offence came from the three-point line with a pair of triples accounting for all six of his points. He also had four assists and four rebounds.
In his second visit to the Staples Center as an NBA player, Compton, Calif., native DeMar DeRozan made amends for a subpar visit the first time in against the Clippers. This time around, he managed 11 points on 4-of-6 shooting before his own foul trouble landed him on the bench prematurely.
On the other side, Andrea Bargnani started out the game looking like he would never find the basket. He was 0-for-5 before he found the mark and then went 6-for-7 from the field, including a pair of threes.
Bosh, who didn't get to the line at all Sunday against the 76ers, went the whole first half without a visit but then got there in the first two minutes of the second half on a determined drive to the hoop with a pair of Lakers draped all over him.
