Kobe Is Showing His Flex Appeal

The biceps wasn’t the size of a barrel. There were no super hero tattoos. It was not scratched from the rim, or bruised from a nose, or even dripping with sweat.

Kobe Bryant showed it just the same. Flexed it and pointed to it and smothered the New Jersey Nets with it.

On a night, not coincidentally, when Shaquille O’Neal could not.

You don’t think there’s still competition between the two best players in the NBA?

You think that just because they’re buddies means they’re no longer rivals?

Most in the basketball world Sunday thought they were watching the Lakers escape the desperate clutches of the Nets in a 106-103 victory to take a three-games-to-none lead in the NBA Finals.

Longtime Laker followers, however, knew that they were watching a playground game of H-O-R-S-E.

Bryant’s exaggerated flex as he came to the bench after his off-balance, win-clinching runner was as much about O’Neal as it was about the Nets.

O’Neal had dominated the first two games of this series.

Bryant felt it was his turn.

“Game time!” he barked at his teammates during the juiced-up final minutes.

A Springsteen-singing, Sopranos-cheering crowd of 19,215 at Continental Airlines Arena was stunned by it.

A reborn New Jersey team was buried in it.

The first two battles between the Lakers and Nets were nothing compared to a third game that revealed the larger, albeit friendly, duel between Kobe and Shaq.

“Absolutely,” Rick Fox said.

“Subconsciously, yeah,” said Brian Shaw. “That’s the way it always is.”

Bryant just smiled.

“Shaq is a Goliath,” he said. “I was just playing off him.”

And playing off the rest of us, who have watched this for six years and know better.

It is a little-known but well-supported statistic that when O’Neal comes out of a game, Bryant nearly always takes the next shot.

And so it was in the fourth quarter Sunday that when O’Neal was taken out of his game with double and triple-teaming, Bryant made the next bunches of shots.

A turnaround jumper here. A driving-past-the-entire-state layup there.

With the Lakers trailing by a handful of points with six minutes left, he made a slithering runner between two defenders.

With the Lakers leading by two, he dribbled behind his back before nailing a fadeaway jumper with Kenyon Martin’s giant hand swinging at his face.

Then, finally, he clinched the win by muscling the ball from Jason Kidd and Kerry Kittles and hitting a right-handed runner while leaping between them.

That’s H-O-R-S-E, right?

That was also the shot that encouraged Bryant to strut to the Laker bench flexing his right biceps and pointing to that biceps like a Mr. Olympian.

Well, OK, Mr. Junior Olympian.

To which Phil Jackson responded with an odd stare.

“He was looking at me in amazement because he didn’t know I had these big, good guns,” Bryant said, smiling. “Just so strong with the ball, I was like number 34 out there.”

Of course he was. That was the point.

After watching O’Neal behave as the Finals MVP for the first two games, Bryant put his name on the ballot.

After being the Lakers best player for the first three rounds, Bryant thought it was time for a reminder.

“It’s the same for both of them,” Shaw said.

“You can just see it.”

Remember when this used to be a bad thing? Back before the two guys figured that they needed each other more than they needed the bickering? Back when the Lakers were swept out of series, instead of being on the verge of sweeping the biggest of them all?

Today, maturity has turned it into a splendid thing. It’s about a competition that no longer burdens this team, but lifts it up.

“We know it’s there, Kobe even says it’s there,” Fox said.

He says it?

“He says it to me,” Fox said. “Said it to me tonight.”

What did he say?

“He said, ‘Give me the ball, give me the ball,’ ” Fox repeated. “He said it about six times. I hate going out of the offense but I just had to give him the ball.”

Bryant explained it in different words.

“They collapse on [Shaq] and make it hard for him to breathe down there, then that’s when I take over,” he said.

Bryant used to blanche at that role, as if it made him a glorified role player.

Now, though, realizing the jewelry that can be obtained with that role, he relishes it.

“In the last couple of years, they blended their talents together very well,” Jackson said. “I think it was Kobe’s ability to grow up, to adjust, to accommodate Shaq’s extending his hand out to Kobe ... “

On Sunday, that hand was in search of a rescue, In every way, Bryant was big enough.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.