The Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Houston Rockets 99-98 at the Toyota Center on Thursday.

The game marked Dwight Howard's first against his former team.

"It's a terrible loss to a team that we should beat, especially on our home floor, and in the Western Conference it's going to be thick, and we're playing for a seeding and we want to be a No. 1 seed," said Chandler Parsons. "A loss like this is something that's going to haunt us. We're going to look back on it tonight, and hopefully we get better from it."

"This is a game that we should have won," Howard said. "We made some big mistakes down the stretch on the defensive end that cost us the game-winning shot. We've just got to learn from our mistakes.

"Every loss hurts. Nobody likes to lose. So it's very upsetting that we lost the way we did, but we've just got to come back and get the next one."