Watching the Los Angeles Lakers play basketball can be like watching some cagey cat play with a trapped mouse.

The little rodent gets a step away and gets caught again. It gets batted around but not too seriously. It escapes for a step or two before it’s reigned back in.

The Lakers play, they toy and, finally, when the mood strikes, they kill.

It’s happened like that a few times for the Lakers this season when they’ve let teams build leads only to turn on a switch and come roaring back to win, when they’ve allowed opponents to feel good about themselves before turning on some unseen switch and pulling out a victory. It’s not a perfect way to play by any means but when you’ve got as much confidence as the Lakers have, and possess an abundance of talent throughout the roster, it’s okay to get away with a little in-game lapse now and then.

“It’s good to know every game is winnable,” Lamar Odom of the Lakers told the media after the team practiced here Saturday. “So we’re down 10 with six minutes left, seven minutes left, we know that we can come back and win that game.”

It may simply be a matter of the Lakers being bored by the humdrum of a regular season. Stacked with talent — their second-stringers would probably be a playoff team in either conference — they took a 13-1 record into a late game last night against the Raptors, they were 8-1 at home to start the night and had won six straight.