Howard has missed the past three games because of a torn labrum in his shoulder, aggravating an injury he initially suffered earlier this season.

Despite winning the three games Howard has missed, the Lakers (23-26) are 10th in the Western Conference playoff race. They also will be without star forward Pau Gasol, who has a tear in the plantar fascia of his right foot, an MRI revealed Wednesday. The Lakers fear Gasol could be sidelined four to six weeks, a source told ESPNLosAngeles.com.

“We don’t have time for (Howard’s shoulder) to heal,” Bryant said Wednesday in an exclusive interview with ESPNBoston.com’s Jackie MacMullan. “We need some urgency.”

The interview with MacMullan came one day after Bryant publicly challenged Howard, stating that playing through an injury is “something that you have to balance out and manage.”

Bryant also asserted that Howard is preoccupied with how he is perceived by fans and media.

“Dwight worries too much about what people think,” Bryant told MacMullan. “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 also speculated that Howard, in his first season with Los Angeles, may not be accustomed to the Lakers’ standards.

“(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 MacMullan. “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.”

Howard preached patience in a recent interview with ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, pointing to the fact that Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal needed three years before winning a championship with the Lakers.

But the 34-year-old Bryant, who is averaging 27.6 points per game in his 17th NBA season, is approaching this season with more desperation.

“We don’t have three years,” Kobe said. “We’ve got this year.”

Howard is listed as day to day, and his status is uncertain for Thursday’s game against the Boston Celtics.

The Lakers are hopeful Gasol’s injury will prompt Howard to return “sooner than later,” a team source told ESPNLosAngeles.com.

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The Lakers did not say how long Gasol will be out, but a league source told ESPNLosAngeles.com that an accurate time frame for his return is difficult to assess without further examination, which Gasol will receive when he returns to Los Angeles. The Lakers, though, are bracing for him to be out at least four to six weeks, the source said.

The Lakers are not sure whether Gasol will need surgery, sources told ESPNLosAngeles.com.

“The result of the MRI shows I have a torn fascia of my right foot,” Gasol tweeted. “Tomorrow I’ll fly back to LA to see our team doctors. #AlwaysPositive”

Gasol also tweeted that’s he’s “hoping to recover asap so I can be back with the team and keep fighting until the end of the season. #GoLakers #AlwaysPositive”

Gasol was injured in Tuesday night’s win over the Brooklyn Nets.

“I tweaked my fascia in the first half, so I was dealing with quite a bit of soreness in the second half,” Gasol said after the game. “So I couldn’t do certain things.

“I was dealing with it, but that play when I tried to jump off of it and try go block the shot (by Brooklyn’s Brook Lopez), just as I took off, I felt a pop in the bottom of my foot on my fascia and I couldn’t get up. I’m worried about it.”

The Lakers, in Boston to play the Celtics on Thursday, said Gasol will fly back to Los Angeles on Thursday to be examined by the team’s medical staff.

Gasol initially tried to play through the injury that occured with 3:50 left in Tuesday’s game. But after one trip up and down the floor, he asked coach Mike D’Antoni for a sub and went to the locker room with Lakers trainer Gary Vitti.

“It felt kind of OK a little bit putting my weight on it without walking or running, but once I started running, I was limping and it was really sore,” Gasol said Tuesday. “Even if I tried, I couldn’t go.”

Gasol finished with 15 points, four rebounds and two blocks in the Lakers’ 92-83 win.

The Lakers were granted a disabled player’s exception for Jordan Hill last week after the backup center went out with season-ending hip surgery. The exception will allow the Lakers to spend a little more than half of Hill’s salary, about $1.78 million, in order to sign a free agent or to absorb a player’s contract acquired in a trade.

Despite Gasol’s foot injury, the Lakers are not dead set on using the exception, a team source told ESPNLosAngeles.com, and they are hopeful the situation will prompt Dwight Howard to return and play through his sore right shoulder “sooner than later.”

The Lakers have won three straight after starting off their seven-game road trip with a loss to Phoenix, and six of seven overall. But they will face an uphill battle to finish off the trip without Gasol and potentially Howard. Gasol already has missed 13 games this season because of tendinitis in both knees and a concussion.

“We’ll see what happens,” D’Antoni told the “Mason & Ireland Show” on ESPNLA 710 radio on Wednesday. “Hopefully, Dwight will be back fairly soon, but you approach it like any other game. Guys got to step up.

“We’ll play with Robert Sacre. We’ll play smaller most of the time. We’ll have Metta (World Peace) back [from a one-game suspension]. So, we still have enough pieces to win games. That’s what we have to do.

“We just got to keep winning and give us a chance to get into the playoffs, then hopefully, we’ll have everybody healthy at that point. But all these games are going to be attacked like they’re playoff games and whoever is available is going to have to play well.”

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