Kobe Keeps Show Going

They just happen, these Kobe Bryant days, signature moves chasing common brilliance, the chants of “MVP” falling at Staples Center like drops of sweat from his chin.

As the Lakers have risen in the Western Conference -- and they inched ahead again Tuesday night with a 121-93 victory against the wretched Denver Nuggets, their sixth consecutive win -- then so too has Bryant, whose end-to-end game for more than two weeks has known no equal.

He scored 42 points, 19 in a you-had-to-be-there third quarter, none in the clear-the-bench fourth quarter, which he spent on the bench, wrapped in warmup gear and towels and satisfaction. He has averaged 40.5 points in the six games that have turned the Lakers’ season from dismal to promising again, and he scored at least 40 points for the 10th time this season, the most for the franchise since Jerry West did it 13 times in the 1969-70 season.

“It’s coming pretty easy right now,” Bryant admitted.

And so it appeared all the Lakers lost over the All-Star weekend was a phone number -- Phil Jackson’s, by Shaquille O’Neal, only a mild crisis by Laker standards. Laker management dismissed it as Shaq being Shaq, and O’Neal atoned with 31 hard minutes and 20 points in Bryant’s spreading offensive shadow.

And on the first day of the rest of their season, the Lakers gained a game in the conference standings on the eighth-place Houston Rockets and the seventh-place Phoenix Suns. With 34 games remaining, they stand a half-game behind the Rockets (and even with 23 losses) and 2 1/2 games behind the Suns, and maybe this will be easier than it looks.

Not surprisingly, they clung to Bryant, who is having one of the most phenomenal runs of NBA basketball in recent memory. Against the Nuggets, who welcomed back Marcus Camby and lost their 10th consecutive road game, Bryant pushed the Laker advantage early from the free-throw line, and then attacked them in the third quarter with a rush of jumpers and break-away baskets.

In his 19-point, six-for-eight-shooting third quarter, Bryant scored nearly half of the Lakers’ 42 points and had four of their five steals.

In the move middle-aged men will try to re-create at water coolers this morning, Bryant ran out after a Nugget basket and collected an in-bound pass over his shoulder from Robert Horry. After several steps at full speed, and with Vincent Yarbrough on his left hip, Bryant dribbled behind his back, lost Yarbrough, spun to the left side of the rim and threw down a reverse dunk, a move he’d made before “maybe one time, in high school.”

It was loud and flashy and grown Lakers stared vacantly and smiled.

“Everybody is following his lead,” O’Neal said of Bryant. “It’s very fun. He’s my choice for MVP right now. He’s playing good, playing at a high level.”

Bryant, in Nikes and perhaps close to an endorsement deal that would make them his permanent footwear, made 12 of 20 shots and 17 of 21 free throws. The 21 attempts from the foul line tied a league high for the season.

“Yeah, he’s pretty terrific,” Jackson said, drawn into a Michael Jordan parallel. “It’s comparable, but it’s a different style, tack. Kobe does a lot of things with the ball. Michael did a lot of things off the ball. But both of them have the ability to get in a position where everything went to them. The ball went to them.”

It was a continuation of the offensive assertiveness for which Jackson asked from Bryant two weeks ago, a request that has resulted in 35 or more points in six consecutive games, all wins.

Jackson more often saves the special tactics for the playoffs, but the Lakers spent those two months playing themselves into a corner. He assumes he’ll have to call off Bryant at some point, presumably to go back to O’Neal and the inside-out game, but no one has come close to checking Bryant, the trendy MVP candidate turned solid MVP candidate.

“We’ll push it at people, but there’ll be defensive changes,” Jackson said. “We’ll have to make some changes offensively, because people have ways to stymie that. I usually don’t like to pull that kind of stuff up until the playoffs or somewhere inside [the playoffs], but we knew we needed to have some kind of really positive energy and there wasn’t time to wait and sit back.”

From there, the Lakers are 25-23, and, it seems, gaining. They play the Nuggets again tonight, in Denver, where Bryant scored 39 points about six weeks ago.