Season on Brink Quickly Became One in Sync

Actually, what family do you know that doesn’t have a little dysfunction?

If the key phrase in the Lakers’ title run last season was “bling bling” (cool rap term for jewelry), this season’s was “dysfunction” (fancy-shmancy psych term for something that isn’t working).

As when Rasheed Wallace threw a towel in Trail Blazer teammate Arvydas Sabonis’ face in a late-season meeting and Rick Fox scoffed, “This year, we have the trophy for team dysfunction. We’re not giving our trophy to them after one towel toss.”

The Laker motto might as well have been Friedrich Nietzsche’s “That which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” which Kobe Bryant read in a newspaper and took to citing.

Nineteen wins later, of course, it’s like stuff that happened in another life, which is the way the Lakers like it.

Who needs to remember Dec. 6 in Oakland, when Bryant shot it out with Antawn Jamison, each scoring 51 as the Warriors won . . . and several Lakers yelled at Kobe from the bench to pass the $%&*! rock?

“It really takes us back to a place where it’s hard to even think about,” Fox says. “It really is because to go from that to the love we feel in the room now. . . . “

He smiles.

“Can you feel the love tonight? We couldn’t feel it that night.”

Nor were they feeling too robust four months later in game No. 74, when they lost at home to the bedraggled Knicks and dropped to No. 4 in the West.

That was April 1 and they haven’t lost since.

Amazingly, after all their kooky behavior, no matter what suspicions Bryant, Phil Jackson, Shaquille O’Neal and Jerry West harbored or confided to the press, in the crunch, everyone did the right thing. They may have been crazy, but it kept them from going insane.

Bryant and O’Neal turned out to be chiefly interested in winning, not dominating the other, as each suspected. However exasperated Jackson was, he really didn’t have it in for Kobe, as Kobe’s people feared. However estranged West felt in the new order, he counseled Bryant to accept it.

The Lakers didn’t flip any switches . . . but Bryant did. Four games into their winning streak, he returned from an ankle injury and turned them into the Beast That Ate the West.

Of course, this was the third time this season everyone had waited to see which way Bryant would go. The first two, he went his own way. This time, he went theirs.

Why this time?

Bryant, a bona fide star but still an emerging personality at 22, doesn’t exactly say. He’ll tell you why he did it and how he did it but not why he waited so long.

Jackson says he doesn’t know. As he told NBC’s Marv Albert, “I think prayer most likely was the biggest key.”

Kobe’s agent, Arn Tellem, isn’t sure either.

“Kobe did it himself,” Tellem says. “It wasn’t anybody else. I think the talk with Jerry might have helped. I think being hurt and watching might have helped. Getting healthy definitely helped.

“I think he realized it was always within him to make it work.”

It works. That’s enough for the Lakers, who can wait until Kobe’s book, or Phil’s or Shaq’s, to find out what happened.

The Origins of Conflict

I trust them [teammates]. I trust myself more.

--Bryant to ESPN the Magazine’s Ric Bucher, January 2001

The O’Neal-Bryant tug-of-war is so enduring, it seems like part of the landscape. Asking how it started seems like asking where the Pacific Ocean came from.

In general, Bryant would err on the ambitious side while making annual quantum leaps. O’Neal, who isn’t into confrontation, except on the floor, would signal his impatience when the golden child went too far. Many headlines later, Bryant would find his way back to them.

The only difference this season was that it lasted all season.

Shaq came in out of shape and didn’t even make 40% of his free throws through the All-Star break, creating a vacuum Kobe was happy to flow into.

By late December, Bryant had chilled and was playing better than he ever had, leading the league in scoring, making plays for teammates . . . until O’Neal blew up at Kobe’s comments in ESPN the Magazine, which Bryant had made earlier on one of his realizing-my-destiny trips and now tried to explain away.

Nevertheless, Shaq zinged him in the papers all January and followed that up by hinting he’d like to be elsewhere all February. At that point, teammates seemed equally exasperated with both of them.

O’Neal missed six games before the All-Star break, which everyone thought would at least be an object lesson for Bryant in how hard it was to carry a team.

Instead, on the Eastern swing coming out of the break, Kobe, now feeling picked on, began butting heads with Jackson. There was one argument on a day off in Charlotte, another during the game the next night.

In March, Bryant sat out two games because of a virus. Things were so tense, there were whispers that he was really mad at Jackson.

Behind the scenes, the Lakers seethed and bubbled. Wild stuff got into the press: Bryant would sue Jackson for slander; the Lakers were exploring trades for Kobe.

Everyone lined up to see if Bryant would come back passing. Instead, he took 95 shots in three games before leaving again, this time because of an injured ankle.

On April 1, the Knicks, who’d been strafed up and down the West Coast--they had a 21-point loss at Vancouver--came in, put 6-foot-5 Larry Johnson on O’Neal . . . and won.

Bryant tried to play but lasted 11 minutes. Jackson said later he was afraid Kobe wouldn’t be back and they were history.

Now they were going away for four games, starting in Utah, where Robert Horry came off the bench and scored 20 points, took down eight rebounds and blocked five shots as they upset the Jazz.

Horry went 0-0-0 the rest of the trip but the Lakers tightened up their defense, threw the ball to O’Neal and won those too, even with J.R. Rider leaving the bench--again--at Boston in what is presumed to have been his Laker farewell.

Home for the final four games, Bryant returned, with Jackson again stressing the need for a “seamless” transition and O’Neal again stressing the need for a hierarchy:

“When I’m not involved, then I’m not the player you’re used to seeing. I’m somebody else and I can’t be somebody else. When I’m somebody else, I get upset. Then I say what I feel like saying. . . . When I get these dog cookies, then the dog will walk, sit, bite, run, fetch, do whatever you want.”

This time it was dog cookies for everyone, on the house.

“The first game Kobe came back,” Fox said, “the first quarter, I might have made four baskets that were all from him. I mean, the times I sat out on the wing and watched my man, for lack of respect for me, go to him because they knew that he would try and score and Kobe would take the tough shot . . .

“I tell you the truth, I was feeling some emotion. I was, ‘cause it was like day and night. I mean, he really, truly was making the rest of us better. To sit there and have had to discuss for 70 games what was wrong and to feel, honestly, through some of his statements that he didn’t trust us . . .

“It was kind of a thing where we weren’t confident basketball players and for him all of a sudden to turn around and say, ‘You know what, I was wrong. Let me ask for forgiveness through my actions.’ . . .

“In the middle of the game I said, ‘Man, I appreciate that. You’ve really turned the corner. You’re showing us by your actions, not by just talking.’ ”

And everyone lived happily ever after, at least for two months.

Kobe or Not Kobe

A lot of times in life, people go through . . . things that really emotionally take you to a place you haven’t been before. You come up with an energy and an effort that you didn’t know you had. I think for our group, that’s what happened to us.

I don’t think we knew how good we could be until we were probably at the most desolate and bottom place that we’d ever been before.

--Derek Fisher

In March, when things were at a low ebb, Tellem, who’s close to the Wests, took Bryant to their home in Malibu for Karen’s spaghetti and Jerry’s advice.

Jerry talked about other tugs-of-war: his ballyhooed disappointment with Wilt Chamberlain and Elgin Baylor in the ‘70s, the years of negotiation between Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar before they became friends in the ‘80s. This wasn’t new, only more visible.

Bryant had lots more going on in his life, marriage and separation from his parents.

When he joined the Lakers at 18, his parents and sisters came out from Philadelphia and lived with him in Pacific Palisades.

Two years later, Kobe moved into his own home, right next to theirs.

This season, his parents moved back to Philadelphia. Kobe and his wife, Vanessa, who’s from Orange County, are looking for a home there.

It has been a transition, all around. Eleven wins into the streak, after they surprised themselves by mopping the floor with the Trail Blazers in the first round, with Bryant averaging 25 points and 7.7 assists, it was still hard to believe things were really different.

Bryant was asked then if it wasn’t a relief to have his struggle with O’Neal behind him.

“Until next season,” Kobe said.

Then they squashed the Kings, whom they’d been leery of, and put the Spurs, whom they’d feared, to the torch too, reaching a level of play they’d never seen or imagined.

Now, at 19-0, with O’Neal calling Bryant his “idol,” even as Kobe outscores him, they sense a new Laker order.

“You know, what I’ve found is, by me improving and making my teammates better, I’ve found it has opened up the game for me offensively,” Bryant says.

“It made things so much easier. Like now, I can drive down the lane and not have guys close me off all the time because they have to respect the threat of my teammates and they have to respect the fact that I might kick it out. And as a result, I’ve been able to get to the basket a lot.

“It’s funny how that works, huh?”

It depends on whom you ask. Around here, it’s a laugh riot.