Bryant Has a Flight of Fancy

Before it was over, Kobe Bryant glided across the court, arms spread out like airplane wings as he ran to the foot of the Laker bench and touched down there.

He had just blocked Michael Redd’s shot, creating a moment his coach would define a few minutes later as one of the best he’d ever seen, and the Lakers had followed their leader to a 95-90 victory over the Milwaukee Bucks in front of 14,975 Tuesday night at the Bradley Center.

Along the way, Bryant found ways to win other than with an outside shot, which deserted him after the first quarter. He handed out 11 assists, many to Brian Cook, who had 25 points and 11 rebounds, both career highs, and he held fellow All-Star Redd to eight points for a second time this season.

Before the Lakers boarded a bus bound for Chicago, Cook had answered his first question about being the next Robert Horry, another big man with a silky-soft touch, and Chucky Atkins had engaged in a difficult-to-describe on-court dance, and Bryant stood in the locker room, discussing how much fun he was having.

Beyond that, the Lakers won a compelling game, an important follow-up for them after a tight loss to Sacramento and an uninspiring victory over New Orleans.

Bryant made four of five shots in the first quarter and missed his remaining eight, on the way to 20 points, but he stayed in the flow of the offense by creating for others and coming up with his stop on Redd with 23.9 seconds left to play.

Redd went hard to the basket, with nothing but space in front of him, before Bryant moved over, timed his leap perfectly and blocked Redd’s dunk attempt left-handed, keeping the Lakers ahead, 92-88.

“That’s one of the best defensive plays I’ve seen,” Laker Coach Rudy Tomjanovich said. “A big factor in us winning this game.”

Said Bryant: “I didn’t want to try and gamble and try to take a charge or something like that -- the call might not go our way -- so I just decided to bait him a little bit and just wait for him at the rim.”

Perhaps inspired by the snowflakes that collected in his three-quarters-length fur coat as he stepped onto the bus that delivered him to the game, Bryant afterward compared this season to the times he had playing basketball while growing up in snow and hail and whatever storm systems worked their way through southeast Pennsylvania.

“It’s kind of like going back to the days where I first started playing basketball in this type of weather, putting on two pair of sweatpants, three sweatshirts, and going out in the driveway or the park and shooting,” Bryant said. “That’s when basketball was at its purest form. It’s wasn’t all the hoopla, or a circus, or the politics built around it. It was just a game. This year, it feels a lot like that. It’s just back to basics.”

Bryant and Cook developed a two-man attack against the Bucks, Bryant often finding Cook behind the arc after being pressed to the side by double-teams.

Cook, who made 10 of 14 shots, five of six from three-point range, lent a touch of credence to Tomjanovich’s comparison of Cook as a budding Horry, although Cook, in his second season, deflected any such notion.

“I haven’t hit the big shots like Robert has,” Cook said. “He’s obviously been in the Finals and hit the big-game shots. There’s never going to be another Robert Horry. I’m just trying to make my own footpath.”

It was a trail littered with injuries last season, when Cook sat out the start of the regular season because of a broken finger, returned for a month, then sustained another broken finger that cost him several more weeks.

Cook sustained a more tolerable injury Tuesday, biting down on a gauze pad during a timeout after taking a shot to the mouth in the fourth quarter.