Things don't work out for Dwight Howard (l.) and Kobe Bryant in Boston on Thursday.  Kobe Bryant's call for urgency fell on deaf ears.  Despite the plea from their leader, the Lakers looked flat in a blowout loss to the Celtics Thursday night in Boston, even with Dwight Howard following Bryant's orders to suck it up and play through the pain in his right shoulder.  The 116-95 thrashing was the capper to a drama-filled day in Laker Land where Bryant and Howard sparred through the media.  Bryant fired the first shot late Wednesday, saying that Howard needs to toughen up, in a hurry, if the Lakers have any shot of reaching the playoffs, a statement that appeared to get under the skin of Howard, who missed the Lakers' three prior games with a torn labrum in his shoulder.  "We don't have time for (Howard's shoulder) to heal," said Bryant, who's dealing with tendinitis in his shooting elbow. "We need some urgency."  With the Lakers losing Pau Gasol for up to six weeks with a foot injury suffered Tuesday night in Brooklyn, Bryant seemed to be putting the pressure on Howard to pick up the slack created by the 7-foot Spaniard's absence.  “That's his opinion, that's it," Howard said after Thursday morning’s shootaround in Boston. "He's not a doctor, I'm not a doctor. That's his opinion."  Howard continued: “I want to play. I mean, why wouldn't I want to play? But at the same time, this is my career, this is my future, this is my life. I can't leave that up to anybody else because nobody else is going to take care of me.  “So, if people are pissed off that I don't play or if I do play, whatever it may be, so what? This is my career. If I go down, then what? Everybody's life is going to go on. I don't want to have another summer where I'm rehabbing and trying to get healthy again. I want to come back and have another great year. That's what I want to do."  RELATED: GARNETT IS 16TH PLAYER IN NBA HISTORY TO POST 25,000 POINTS  Both players started Thursday night's game, with Bryant scoring 27 points in 30 minutes and Howard going for nine points and nine rebounds before fouling out in the fourth quarter. When he fouled out, Howard took the last seat on the Lakers bench, with Bryant sitting near the coaches on the other end.  The Daily News first reported last month that there was trouble brewing in L.A., and that Bryant and Howard got into in a heated back-and-forth following a New Year's Day loss to the 76ers. Bryant and Howard seemed to poke fun at the notion of a rift between the two stars, with Bryant tweeting a photo of the two men squaring off while Mike D'Antoni attempts to break up the "fight."  But two weeks after The News reported on the mounting friction between Bryant and Howard, ESPN reported that Bryant confronted the 27-year-old center before a loss to the Memphis Grizzlies on Jan. 23. Bryant acknowledged that he was "hard to play with" and asked the All-Star center if he was bothered playing alongside him. Howard reportedly clammed up when Bryant posed the question, and later said that Bryant "never asked me if I liked playing with him," before saying that he has no problem playing with Bryant but "it's something that we all got to learn. We got to learn how to play together."  Howard, who was slowed by a back injury that required offseason surgery, hasn't been the same player since joining the Lakers in an offseason trade with the Magic. His scoring (16.5) and rebounding (11.9) numbers are the lowest they've been since his sophomore and rookie seasons, respectively.  "Dwight worries too much about what people think," Bryant said. "I told him, 'You can't worry about that. It's holding you back.' He says, 'OK, OK, OK,' but it's always hovering around him.  "He just wants people to like him. He doesn't want to let anyone down, and that gets him away from what he should be doing."  Bryant, a notoriously intense teammate, admits that the pressure of playing in Los Angeles may be a bit overwhelming for Howard.  "(Howard) has never been in a position where someone is driving him as hard as I am, as hard as this organization is," Bryant told ESPN. "It's win a championship or everything is a complete failure. That's just how (the Lakers) do it. And that's foreign to him.  "When you think about it, there aren't many organizations that look at it that way. There are only two that can really honestly say that's what they live by — Los Angeles and Boston."
Firing back at criticism from Kobe Bryant that he doesn’t play through pain, the oft-injured Howard who is dealing with a shoulder problem, questioned his Laker teammates’ medical expertise.