I suddenly am impressed with this Lakers team, after having despaired of them, most of the season. (Pretty much from the 1-4 start forward.)

Kobe Bryant out till sometime next season with the ruptured Achilles, Steve Nash hurt again, a playoffs berth clinched when Utah lost earlier in the evening …

Not needing to win to make the playoffs, they still went out and beat Houston in overtime last night,  moving past the Rockets and into the No. 7 seed in the West.

And Pau Gasol (remember him?) was huge.

Some takeaways from this game:

–Playing hard against the Rockets made sense. The seven seed in the West plays the San Antonio Spurs, who are good, but who have gone out early the past two years, the working explanation being that Gregg Popovich has them playing at such a high level in the regular season that they can’t shift to another gear in the playoffs. That, and two of the team’s key guys — Tim Duncan and Manu Giniboli — are old and tired and hurt a lot.

–The eight seed in the West has a much tougher first-round matchup, the Oklahoma City Thunder. The same Thunder (minus James Harden) who overpowered the Lakers in five games last year. They had basically zero chance against OKC. Now Houston gets the Thunder in the first round.

–Maybe it’s not Pau, it’s the Lakers. With the floor cleared a bit, with Kobe in the hospital, Pau Gasol played like a star, putting up a triple-double — 17 points, 20 rebounds, 11 assists. He and Dwight Howard seemed to get along fine out there; Howard had 16 points and 18 rebounds.

–Pau is expensive, and the Lakers are going to be approximately $1 billion over the salary cap if they keep him and Kobe and Howard, but maybe it’s worth looking at. Give Mike D’Antoni all summer to ponder how to get the three of them to coexist, and maybe they are a 55-win team next year, instead of 45-37. Gasol remains one of the most skilled big men in the game, which he showed last night.

–The expectations for these Lakers in the playoffs are not high, which might make them more dangerous. We still assume they will go out in the first round — they start Steve Blake and Jodie Meeks, for goodness sake. But winning can be easier when athletes have a sense they are not expected to.

–If the Lakers somehow beat San Antonio, they could get through another round, too, against the survivor of the No. 3 Denver vs. No. 6 Golden State series. Put it this way: The Lakers’ path to the Western Conference finals (San Antonio, presumably Denver, minus Danilo Gallinari) looks less difficult than that of the Clippers (Memphis, then OKC).

–I like the way this team played, down the stretch, first with Kobe playing out of his mind for a couple of weeks, and then with the survivors defeating San Antonio and Houston. They finished with an 8-1 run.

The best part of this is … these Lakers don’t have to do anything. This little run at the end of a weird, injury-strewn, failed-chemistry, multi-coach season gives me hope. Not so much for the next 10 days, but for the next year or two.