View From The Other Side

Right, let’s take this one ball-peen hammer at a time. The Lakers can:

(a) Crush you inside with Shaquille O’Neal until you cry uncle;

(b) Slash you outside with Kobe Bryant until you cry for mom;

(c) Does there really have to be a (c)?

And the answer, of course, is:

(d) How did this team lose a game this year?

Last weekend it was O’Neal’s turn to carve up the Kings. Thursday night belonged utterly to Bryant, right to the point that the game was decided, which was, oh, late in the second quarter.

And there is a clear and compelling lesson here, which for the purposes of brevity will be summarized by King front-office maven Jerry Reynolds.

“When you’re talking about trying to win championships--you look over in that locker room,” Reynolds was saying late Thursday night, the Lakers’ 113-89 flaying of the Kings still a wide-open wound. “That [Bryant and O’Neal] could be running together for another 10 years.”

Wow, thoroughly depressing. Anything else?

“You can say that they’ve got two of the five best players in the world,” Reynolds added. “And I will say this: Kobe at 21 years old is better than Michael Jordan was at 21.”

The Chicago Bulls, a team that Phil Jackson once coached, had a pretty fair one-two combination in Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen. It worked decently, assuming you consider six NBA titles to be a decent sort of working result.

And let’s not get ahead of ourselves here; the Lakers aren’t even out of the first round of the 2000 NBA playoffs. As Bryant said, “Sunday’s game [at Arco Arena] is going to be a different game, because that place will be rocking and rolling.”

But you get the idea. Nick Anderson certainly did.

“I played against a one-two punch, Pippen and Jordan,” Anderson said. “And they’ve got a one-two punch in that locker room. When [Shaq] is on the floor, it’s hell. He makes it hell.

“And you focus on him. . . . What do you do? Tell me, what do you do?”

From here? You watch and wonder, is all.

Bryant has so many facets to his game that it’s almost unfair. No offense to Vince Carter, but anyone who would take Carter over Bryant to build his dream team is living a lie. Thursday, he scored baskets close in and from so far away that on one three-point shot he landed on his tush practically at the midcourt circle while watching his ball swish through the net.

By halftime, O’Neal had been limited to 11 points. Bryant had 22. The Lakers led by 15. Any questions?

“We spent a lot of time talking about Shaq,” King Coach Rick Adelman said. “We probably should have spent more talking about Kobe.”