Bernie Bickerstaff's focus is for the Lakers to just win

• It was a packed house at the Lakers media room before Friday's game
• Bickerstaff doesn't know how long he'll be the coach
• Mike Brown still has $11 million left on his contract

LOS ANGELES -- As Bernie Bickerstaff stared at the glare of the lights and heard the rapid fire of so many cameras inside a packed media room at the Staples Center before his team played Golden State on Friday evening, there were plenty of other places he would rather have been.

This had not been the plan that morning, when the 68-year-old Lakers assistant prepared for shoot-a-round and hoped the underperforming Lakers could turn things around after their 1-4 start. But after, as USA TODAY Sports first reported, 42-year-old head coach Mike Brown had been fired, Bickerstaff was the new interim coach who wished that wasn't the case.

"We all hurt, because there's a mutual respect (for Brown)," Bickerstaff, who hasn't been a head coach since 2007 but has logged 14 seasons at the helm in his long career, said before the Lakers improved to 2-4 with a 101-77 victory over the Warriors. "Mike's a great coach. Mike has won a lot of basketball games. He's been in the Finals (with Cleveland in 2007), and he's had the opportunity to coach two of the greatest basketball players in the league in LeBron and Kobe Bryant. He'll land. I have no reservations about that."

Bickerstaff has known Brown for a long time. He hired Brown as a young video coordinator when he was with the Denver Nuggets in the mid-1990s and later hired him as an assistant in Washington.

The problem, of course, was the Brown's bosses certainly had their reservations.

Yet while owner Jerry Buss, his son and lead executive, Jim Buss, and general manager Mitch Kupchak continued to ponder Brown's replacement, with leading options believed to include a Phil Jackson return or the possible hiring of Mike D'Antoni or even Jerry Sloan, the players and coaches who are waiting for their next directive tried - as Bickerstaff so emphatically said - "to win the game."

"If I might plagiarize for a minute, and borrow something from our professional football brethren, we will try to win the game," Bickerstaff said in a tribute to the famous quote from former New York Jets head coach Herm Edwards. "I have no expectations other than tonight. I have no control over anything. Whatever Mitch asks me to do, that's what I"ll do."

The results may not have been there just yet with Brown,but the respect remained. Small forward Metta World Peace, who played under Brown when he was an assistant in Indiana, paid his respects by rattling off Brown's resume as if it were in front of him to read.

"To come up under (San Antonio coach Gregg) Popovich, to help Indiana win 61 games - the most they ever won in history, under Rick Carlisle, taking the Cleveland Cavaliers to the championship for the first time ever," World Peace said. "And then coming to coach the Lakers. And he's 42 years old, I think. He's still young. I think any video person in America, in the world, right now would want to be Mike Brown right now if I'm not mistaken. And he got paid pretty good to do the job, and he's not the first person who got fired ... It happens."

Brown was fired in the second of three guaranteed seasons on his deal, and he was still owed approximately $11 million. He made an ambitious attempt to revamp the team's offense with a "Princeton" system that was at the root of his hiring of Eddie Jordan as an assistant, but his players ultimately struggled to get comfortable with the new setup.

He faced plenty of challenges that weren't self-imposed, too, among them center Dwight Howard's return from April back surgery late in the preseason and the left leg injury to new point guard Steve Nash that forced him to miss the last four games. Yet even with the 0-8 preseason record and the 1-4 regular season mark that was the first time the Lakers had started so slow since 1993-94, Bickerstaff - who has been given no indication how long he might hold this interim job - still sees hope.

"I think we're ahead of the game for the simple reason of this: we thought Dwight (Howard) would be playing in January (as opposed to October)," Bickerstaff said. "Dwight is playing. He's got five games, plus some exhibition games under his belt. As far as I'm concerned, I think we're ahead of the game in that situation ... It takes time to bring everything together."

Even still, time ran out on Mike Brown.