Shaq-Kobe Stuff Has a Precedent and It Isn’t Good

Dysfunction, thou art purple and gold.

The Lakers put it all together Sunday, or rather, saw it all come apart. Kobe Bryant didn’t pass. Shaquille O’Neal couldn’t defend.

The ball didn’t go anywhere else so after Bryant (34 points) O’Neal (31) and Isaiah Rider (12), the rest of the team scored 5-4-4-2-0-0-0-0.

Not that this should be a surprise but they didn’t win, either, even though they were at home against the 24-18 Miami Heat, whose center is sitting out the season, obliging Pat Riley to put 6-foot-7 Anthony Mason on O’Neal.

This finishes a relaxing stretch of nine games in three weeks, seven of them at Staples Center, in which the Lakers went only 6-3. Their lackluster effort would be a great mystery, if so much hadn’t been heard about the problems their two stars are having with each other.

These days, when the press is full of Shaq-Kobe stuff, one of them may see something he doesn’t like one day and blow up, as O’Neal did after reading Bryant’s (since disavowed) quotes in an ESPN the Magazine story.

And then, after things settle back into a sullen silence, maybe the other guy reads something he doesn’t like, so he blows up.

Maybe that was what happened with Bryant on Sunday. Or maybe it was having his old buddy and rival, Eddie Jones, here, on national TV. In any case, Bryant, who had been worlds better recently, played a game that was vintage November, taking 27 shots with no assists.

Afterward, Phil Jackson said it was because the Heat defense pressured him and made playmaking difficult. Bryant agreed.

Or was there more going on than that?

By convention, nobody talks about the possible ramifications of the Shaq-Kobe thing. They may hint at problems of the spirit but if they’re asked to account for them, they’ll say it’s a . . . great mystery!

“We need to go home and sit down and think about what we do, as a team,” said Ron Harper, their elder statesman, hinting away. “Are we on the same page? Are we here to help this team out . . . or are we here for ourself?”

Did this have anything to do with all the Shaq-Kobe stuff?

“I don’t read that [stuff] so I don’t know so I can’t even comment on that [stuff],” Harper said.

Well, the writer said, helpfully, there have been reports that O’Neal and Bryant aren’t getting along . . .

“That ain’t me,” Harper said. “I got my own kids at home. Now you want to talk basketball, I’ll talk basketball. You want to talk about them, you go ask them, all right? I don’t get in that he said, she said.

“OK? Next.”

Maybe this is just how it has to be.

This wouldn’t be the first title defense that submerged around here, not by a long shot, or an airball.

In the 1980-81 season, Magic Johnson’s second, the Lakers, coming off a title, splattered themselves all over their defense. Owner Jerry Buss gave Johnson, his personal favorite, a “lifetime” contract, which didn’t go down well with veterans Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Jamaal Wilkes, who noted they were on much shorter-term deals.

And Johnson got hurt and when he came back the team passed out “Magic’s Back” buttons to the crowd and the veterans rolled their eyes anew.

And then in the playoffs, Norm Nixon said he wanted the ball more in the newspapers, and Johnson replied in the papers that if Nixon wanted the ball, they’d give him one with his name on it. And then Nixon asked Johnson what he meant by that just before they went out to play the third and deciding game of the series against Houston, which ended with Magic breaking off a play that was supposed to go into Kareem and throwing up a season-ending airball.

“Disease of moi,” said Miami Coach Pat Riley, who was a Laker assistant in 1981. “That’s what it was.

“It was a very immature championship team that came apart at the seams for a lot of reasons. And it manifested itself in the final game against the Houston Rockets. It happened. It broke apart.

“But it happens. We learned from that and it never happened again . . .

“I don’t know what’s going on with them [the current Lakers] really, other than what I read. I think the press is probably having more fun with it than probably what is involved. It’s two great players who simply want to win and are growing together, trying to do that. They won a championship together and I’m sure they want to win 10. And sometimes you go through these kinds of things.”

Sometimes, indeed. This was one more day of it and, by the look and sound of it, it won’t be the last.