Bynum's not here, but he made it all possible for Lakers

DENVER -- Thanks for coming, Andrew.

Andrew Bynum's season effectively ended last week with Phil Jackson calling his chance of returning this spring "remote," which sounded so inevitable, it ran as a secondary item in Lakers notebooks.

Bynum's season lasted 35 games -- the most important 35 for the Lakers since Shaquille O'Neal left.

Between Kobe Bryant's rant about trading Bynum in May ("I mean, Jason Kidd, c'mon!") and Jan. 13 when Bynum's season was halted, he had turned Bryant around, from rage at management to respect for its judgment, from demanding a trade to a team that could win a title to realizing, like Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz," there was no place like home.

The night after Bynum was lost, Bryant ended months of cool detachment at their surprising start with the 10 words that meant it was morning again in Lakerdom:

"We're a championship-caliber team with him in the lineup."

And so they were.

"Kobe recognized what his advance was this year," Jackson says of Bynum. "Obviously, there was a little trial and tribulation for a period of time we went through in training camp.

"But after that -- hey, this is a facet of our game that we haven't had in five years. There it is."

Here's how bright the Lakers' future is: They're still favored to win the West with Bynum gone.

Not that they don't miss -- a lot -- what he would bring after two games of seeing the Denver Nuggets stroll down the lane and lay the ball up when they're not jumping over the Lakers' backs to take 34 offensive rebounds in two games.

Bynum was a top-10 rebounder and shot blocker, so the day they get him back, all that's over.

Coming off the bench for the first 10 games, Bynum still averaged 11 points and 11 rebounds in November, taking it up to 13-9 in December and 19-13 in the first six games of January before going down against Memphis.

The Lakers were 24-11 at that point, despite a difficult early schedule.

You may remember Bryant wasn't in the best frame of mind, trying to put together a trade to Chicago right up to the opener before resigning himself to starting the season here -- which wasn't the same thing as promising to stay for the whole thing ("I'm not Nostradamus.")

Bryant has an iron will, so if he's going the right way, there is little in nature that can stop him.

Unfortunately, when he's not, there's also little that can stop him, and at that point the arrow was definitely pointing to "elsewhere."

If Bynum hadn't improved and the Lakers had started, say, 15-20 (they closed last season 16-27 as Bynum hit the wall) and had then gone 4-5, as they did before acquiring Pau Gasol on Feb. 1, they would have been 19-25, No. 10 in the West, 5 1/2 games out of the No. 8 playoff spot.

Impressed as Bryant would have been at getting Gasol, would that have been enough to keep Bryant if they had missed the playoffs?

Let's just say the Lakers are glad they never had to find out.