All Eyes Are on Bryant, but It May Be Look or Glare

The whole Laker season was filled with false starts, snafus and lowered expectations, highs and lows, so why should the last trip for the final game be any different?

True, the Lakers can cover a lot of ground in a little time, as they did Wednesday night when they spent most of the night looking like a lottery team and ended it as the Pacific Division champions thanks to two clutch three-pointers by Kobe Bryant and a decidedly un-clutch loss by the Sacramento Kings at Golden State.

The Lakers lost Karl Malone to a sprained right ankle, Devean George to strained left calf and Derek Fisher to a strained groin muscle along the way, but they picked up two spots in the conference rankings and now are seeded No. 2 after their stunning, 105-104 victory over Portland in double overtime.

“It’s funny,” Shaquille O’Neal said. “After all the [stuff] we went through this year, we still win the Pacific Division.”

And not a drop of champagne to celebrate. There was more exhaustion than jubilation. The injured limped out of the locker room. Bryant broke out, continuing his beat writer boycott.

O’Neal was mad about making only one of eight free throws before fouling out in the second overtime.

Playoffs, anyone?

“This is the moment we’ve been waiting for,” O’Neal said.

Last year they got a whiff of the springtime air and started the playoffs with an impressive performance in Game 1 at Minnesota. That was with a team that had been through three consecutive championships together. This group is still finding itself, and Jackson recently found himself wondering whether the 2004 edition could get it together in time.

Malone and Gary Payton are underused one night, ineffective the next. Jackson had to tell his players to involve Payton in the offense during the first half of the Golden State game. In Portland, Payton and Malone had plenty of looks and missed their first nine shots.

Of course, the key is Bryant. In the past, whatever might have transpired during the regular season, he always got with the program during the playoffs.

This season, especially after the wild swing that saw him shoot 13 times Sunday and 29 times Tuesday, they’re not sure what to expect from Bryant.

Even his availability will be in doubt on game dates that conflict with pretrial hearings in his sexual assault case in Colorado.

Jackson hoped that Bryant’s common sense would prevail.

“Sometimes his needs overwhelm the rest of the ballclub’s necessity,” Jackson said before the game. “As we get into the playoffs, that’ll dissipate, because he knows that he’s got to put his ego aside and conform to what we have to do if we’re going to go anywhere in the playoffs.”

They rose and fell with him Wednesday night. He missed three of five shots as the Lakers fell behind in the first. He got hungry and scored five of the Lakers’ first six points in the fourth quarter to bring them back. Then he used his teammates, knocked down an open three-pointer after O’Neal drew in the defense and passed out, then he passed to a cutting Slava Medvedenko, who was fouled and made both free throws to give the Lakers their first lead.

But on the next four possessions, Bryant forced a bad shot over Ruben Patterson, traveled as he tried to spin through traffic in the lane, uncharacteristically missed two free throws, then launched a long three-pointer over Patterson that missed, leaving the Lakers down by three points.

He redeemed himself by somehow squeezing past Patterson and firing a three-pointer that swished with 1.1 seconds remaining, sending the Lakers to overtime.

At the end of the second overtime, with the Lakers down by two following yet another defensive breakdown and layup by Damon Stoudamire, Bryant took an inbounds pass with one second remaining and made a high-arcing three-pointer at the buzzer that gave him 37 points in 53 minutes of play on the second night of a back-to-back.

“Ridiculous,” was the word Jackson used to describe the shot.

O’Neal rushed to sing Bryant’s praises, calling him his “courageous little brother,” only 24 hours after dancing his way out of questions about him.

Sometimes they look to Bryant to win games. Sometimes they glare at him for shooting them out of games.

What makes Jackson think Bryant will play along?

“It’s the immediacy of the problem,” Jackson said. “The problem being that we’re going to be in the playoffs. We’ve got to play as a team in all aspects.”

I don’t think I’ve ever heard the onset of the playoffs referred to as a “problem” before. Yet that’s exactly what it is for the Lakers. They’re not physically or mentally ready. They just woke up 10 minutes before the final exam.

They still aren’t running the offense. Jackson said there were times during Tuesday’s game against Golden State that he couldn’t recognize what the players were doing. And he said one of their biggest problems is that “our first unit doesn’t jell very well out there.”

So the starting five is injured and out of sync. Not the news a team wants to hear going into the playoffs.

Just getting places has been a problem for the Lakers. Their charter flight to Portland late Wednesday had to return to L.A. after the landing gear wouldn’t retract. So they went home and came back to the airport Wednesday morning.

“Just buckle your seat belt and ride the ride,” assistant coach Jim Cleamons said.

Maybe that’s the best advice for anyone attempting to follow the Lakers in the playoffs.

*

J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Adande, go to latimes.com/adande.