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Mark Heisler:
NBA

Bryant takes it to the next level

LAKERS

Karen Tapia-Andersen, Los Angeles Times

The Lakers season started off with a bit of uncertainty. Kobe Bryant said during the summer he wanted to be traded and publicly voiced his displeasure about team's direction. Here he is surrounded by the press during the annual Media Day in El Segundo.

Kobe leads Lakers to the second round for the first time since the O'Neal trade.
Mark Heisler, NBA
April 30, 2008
Kobe in the Promised Land, Act II.

Remember when the first round of the playoffs blocked the Lakers' way, as impenetrable as a mountain range?

 
You should. It wasn't that long ago.

For all those years it fell to Kobe Bryant to pull their little covered wagon through those mountains, even if it kept rolling back down and taking him with it.

Not that he's inclined to reminisce now. Asked about his first victory in a playoff series since 2004, he gave one of his studious answers about "execution."

Pressed, he acknowledged it was a landmark ("It kind of feels like I'm back home. This is where we belong,") just not the one that counts.

If the journey was relatively brief (it took the post-Larry Bird Celtics 10 years to win a playoff series) the Lakers made up for it in weirdness:

From Rudy Tomjanovich fleeing in 2005, to blowing a 3-1 lead over Phoenix in 2006 when Bryant was pilloried nationwide for not shooting in Game 7, to last spring's lifeless 4-1 loss to the Suns that prompted Kobe's days of rage.

Happily for the Lakers, they made it through those times together.

Of course, it was really close.

------

Before assistant coach Brian Shaw won three titles alongside Shaquille O'Neal and Bryant, he and O'Neal were in Orlando running their "Shaw-Shaq Redemption" lob play.

Unfortunately, one day half the act left and Shaw had no one to lob the ball to.

Years later, when Lakers ownership was optimistic about what was possible without O'Neal and traded him, Shaw knew better.

"I thought it would be the exact same experience," Shaw says. "In Orlando's situation, you had Shaq, Penny Hardaway and the rest of the guys that were on the team weren't guys that could go get their own shots.

"It was basically the same kind of setup in L.A. You had Shaq. You had Kobe, who was an attack player. But then you had role players around them," such as Robert Horry, Derek Fisher and Rick Fox, "that basically did the same thing."

Of the trade, he says, "I, for one, when that happened, I wasn't a proponent of it, after having been through wars with Shaq in Orlando and here again in L.A."

Knowing what he knew, where did Shaw see their happy ending coming from?

"I'll say this," he says, laughing, "the year that Rudy T. came aboard, I was scouting so I was out of the everyday basketball operation because, just personally, I knew it wasn't going to be any fun . . .

"I don't care what other pieces you got -- Caron [Butler], Lamar [Odom]-- in that trade, it still doesn't measure up to a guy you have to pay attention to down on the low post.





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