38 for Bryant Is Not Enough

Kobe Bryant was back on a basketball court, back in the starting lineup, back in his zone on Wednesday night.

And then he was back in the locker room, explaining another Laker defeat, this one to the Denver Nuggets, 107-101, at Pepsi Center.

They all were.

Bryant had sat out three games because of a sprained right ankle.

He rolled off the trainers’ table, scored 38 points, made 16 of 28 shots, took 10 rebounds, had six assists, and generally looked as if he had spent the past week reloading, and not rehabilitating.

But it didn’t work, again.

“It’s a very disappointing loss,” Laker Coach Phil Jackson said. “It’s a game we shouldn’t have lost.”

Afterward, Bryant had his ankles re-taped for the flight home. In the aftermath of another big lead lost, of the Nuggets’ 32-point fourth quarter, Bryant said he just had to play.

“I was just so happy to be back,” he said, “I forgot about everything else.”

Shortly before game time, when Jackson needed a decision, Bryant said he thought, “Oh well, I just have to suck the pain up.”

The Lakers had won four in a row, three of them without Bryant. They had won nine of 11.

Then Nick Van Exel made a three-point shots from the right wing, the Lakers didn’t play enough defense in the fourth quarter and the offense fell away, leaving only Shaquille O’Neal, who had 23 points and 11 rebounds, and Bryant.

In the deciding fourth quarter, Van Exel, the former Laker, scored 13 points. The Nuggets shot 14 free throws, and made 13. The Lakers missed 15 of 21 shots.

“Defense,” Horace Grant muttered. “Until we learn how to play defense as a team, we’re going to be middle of the pack. And middle of the pack is not going to win a championship.”

Nearly two hours before game time, Bryant went to the court. Wearing his shorts that near to the opening tip for the first time in a week, he walked through the tunnel, nodded his head and said, “I’m about to go find out.”

Twenty minutes later, after shooting some and signing some autographs and chatting with TNT’s Cheryl Miller, he returned through the same tunnel and said, “It hurts. [But] I’m thinking about playing through it.”

Then he did. He started for J.R. Rider in a backcourt with Brian Shaw. He scored on his first jumper, an 18-footer from the left wing. Then, a 19-footer.

He was tentative, or cautious, at times. On a breakaway, 10 feet ahead of the nearest Nugget, Bryant left the floor off his left foot and, with the crowd begging for some tomahawk-windmill-double-clutch thing, finger-rolled it in.

The crowd, of course, booed the exercise in discretion.

Trainer Gary Vitti, the man who tends to Bryant’s various injuries--the shoulder, the hip, the knee, the pinkie, ankles--marvels at Bryant.

“He’s a warrior,” Vitti frequently says. “The kid is a warrior.”

Then Vitti sends him out, wrapped in tape.

Bryant made four of five field-goal attempts in the first quarter, most of them spot-up jumpers. By halftime, Bryant was eight for 12 from the field, floating his jumper as though he hadn’t missed a week at all and gently prying defenders away from O’Neal.

It would be a jump-shooting game for the Lakers because of how the Nuggets defended O’Neal. Nugget Coach Dan Issel started the game with athletic but stringy Antonio McDyess pushing O’Neal from behind, and with Raef LaFrentz and, occasionally, an available guard, on the double and triple teams.

O’Neal flicked passes from the low post, and Grant scored 10 first-half points. Rider made all three of his first-half shots. Mike Penberthy scored seven points in the first half, and the Lakers pushed their lead to 57-51.

In the end, the decision was made to have Bryant play based on some marginal improvement in his right ankle and the fact the Lakers won’t play again until Saturday in Vancouver.

The game, broadcast by TNT, began at 8:30 p.m. local time. It meant a long day at the hotel followed by a long, commercial-laden game and then a late flight home.

“I don’t think it’ll be any bother,” Jackson had said. “We’ll be all right.”

The Lakers, though, lost their momentum in the second half. They also lost all of a 10-point, third-quarter lead. With two minutes left in the third, they led by nine. Five possessions into the fourth, they trailed by one.

The streak-shooting Nuggets made a 12-2 run while the Lakers pushed up poor shots form the perimeter. Jackson tried his fourth-quarter luck again, opening the quarter with a lineup of Rider, Penberthy, Bryant, Mark Madsen and Robert Horry. Horry left the game because of back stiffness.

So they traded baskets for most of the fourth quarter, Bryant and O’Neal on one end, McDyess, Van Exel and Robert Pack on the other. The Lakers hardly defended the pick-and-roll or guard penetration, turned up their own offense and hoped it would be enough.