A Hitch in Their Get-Along

The Lakers are cracking, and it’s going to take more than all the king’s Zen to put them back together.

Sometimes it seems as if Kobe Bryant wants the Maurice Podoloff Trophy more than the Larry O’Brien Trophy. In other words, a most-valuable-player award instead of the championship.

And at times it seems as if Shaquille O’Neal, with all of his comments about dogs not being fed, is more upset by the shutdown of Pets.com than the Lakers’ drop-off from last season’s championship pace.

They both think the Lakers would be better served if the offense went through them. And the friction from these grinding parts is beginning to cause the whole machine to sputter.

Not even Coach Phil Jackson, with his collection of Buddhist and Native American sayings, can mend this divide. He has taken O’Neal’s side publicly, met with Bryant privately and no progress has been made.

Bryant feels bolder. Making several big plays on the way to an NBA championship before turning 22 can have that effect.

O’Neal is getting crankier. He is airing his gripes on the record far more frequently.

The call goes out to Jerry West. He’s the one who brought O’Neal and Bryant here, he’s an authority they both respect. Mitch Kupchak has done a credible job handling the personnel duties since he took over for West this summer. But this is an example of the one component in which Kupchak could never duplicate West: aura.

West retired, in part, because he was sick of dealing with all of these matters. But he still swings his black Mercedes down to the Lakers’ practice facility in El Segundo occasionally. The next time he does, he needs to sit down with the two superstars and have a chat.

Tell them how he managed to get it done with Wilt Chamberlain.

Remind them that Magic Johnson had to defer to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for the first half of his career and didn’t formally take over until Pat Riley stated that it was his time.

Let them know that sometimes in the NBA, things become problems simply because enough people say they are.

Bryant and O’Neal didn’t have to love each other for them to win a championship. If they had their differences of opinion at the start of the season, it was nothing new. The fact that it lingered after this whole thing was supposedly solved last season was a little alarming, but if they got it right before, they could do it again, right?

“I don’t know why anybody else would want to change, other than for selfish reasons,” O’Neal told reporters at practice Wednesday.

Problem is Kobe’s like Simba in “The Lion King”: He just can’t wait to be king.

West should take him to the mountaintop, peer out over the vista and tell him: “Someday all this will be yours.”

Except it isn’t time yet. Not as long as O’Neal still shoots 56% from the floor.

The media loves turmoil among champions (see Chicago Bulls: 1991-1998). And O’Neal kept the story alive with his complaining.

Bryant has started to fire back his own shots.

“Things change,” Bryant said. “Things evolve. You have to grow with that change.”

So now it isn’t going away. It will be, at the bare minimum, a distraction from now until whenever the Lakers finish their season.

And it won’t go away, because neither player is going away.

The Lakers weren’t about to trade Bryant, even if he had responded positively to Jackson’s question when he asked Kobe if that’s what he wanted. Far too complicated. But the fact that Jackson even broached the subject demonstrates that this issue is critical to the future of the franchise.

It’s a commonly accepted fact in the NBA that you need at least two Hall of Fame-caliber players on your team to win a championship. And how often is it that you see Hall-of-Famers in their prime swapped for Hall-of-Famers in their prime? Almost never. If the Lakers have to trade one of their superstars the best they can hope for in return is a couple of good players, and then the Lakers will be merely a good team--not a championship contender.

If they can’t work it out, the whole foundation--indeed, West’s legacy to the Lakers and their fans--will go to waste.

We’ll say this again, simply because the point isn’t getting through. The Lakers need to go to O’Neal consistently through the first three quarters, then to Bryant in the fourth.

O’Neal still does more to affect the other team--he’s always the focal point of their defensive strategy--and sending the ball inside opens more shots for rest of the team. But his free-throw shooting makes him a fourth-quarter liability, while Bryant’s one-on-one skills and clutch shooting make him a perfect go-to guy in crunch time.

Yes, Bryant is shooting a career-high 47% from the field. His ratio of bad shots to good shots decreases all the time. That doesn’t justify taking 171 more shots than the player with the best field goal percentage in the game, or straying from the method that won the Lakers a championship last year.

The Lakers lead the league in points (101.0 a game), with Bryant scoring almost a third of them (29.6). But they’re way back at 23rd in points allowed (97.0)

Bryant is correct when he points out the Lakers have more issues on defense than on offense. But Bryant’s shots and shot selection can contribute to their defensive problems.

When O’Neal shoots, the shots are from around the rim. That means the defenses collapse and the rebounds come off near the basket.

Bryant’s shots tend to come from farther out, leading to longer rebounds and allowing the defense to be in a better position to convert those rebounds into fastbreaks the other way.

O’Neal’s entire game--at both ends--seems to improve when he’s in the flow. As he says: “When you feed the big dog, the dog will be happy.”

The big dog is hungry and the Lion King is putting his own Hakuna Matata ahead of everything else. It’s up to Jerry West to bring order to this zoo.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at his e-mail address: j.a.adande@latimes.com