They Can Only Hope That Form Follows Dysfunction

Hello dysfunction, their old friend.

Not that this should have come as a surprise, but the Lakers won’t set a record for victories, after all, even if they go unbeaten the rest of the way.

No matter how many Hall of Famers they have, they’re still the Lakers, the greatest show on Earth but only the No. 5 team in the Western Conference at the All-Star break.

Not that this is the old story of young multimillionaires messing with each other and their surrogate dad. After all their symbolic showdowns, they’re heading for a real one, and it’s not in April, when the playoffs start, but July 1, when Kobe Bryant will opt out of his contract.

Both sides have been disinvesting for months, which is why teammates, starting with Shaquille O’Neal, were less, not more, forgiving of Bryant despite his “situation,” why Kobe wasn’t more accommodating, why they leveled off before their injuries and why speculation Bryant would leave burst into headlines before the All-Star break.

After that, as the Raiders’ Lester Hayes once noted, it was like trying to walk through a gantlet of pit bulls while wearing pork chop underwear.

There were three days of Will He, Won’t He, Why Won’t He and He’s an Ingrate. In case you missed it, they also played the All-Star game here.

Despite Bryant’s now-vigorous assurance that the Lakers are his first preference, he’s thought to be leaning toward leaving, but he’s right about one thing: Nothing means anything until July 1.

He’s determined to have a choice and, despite his insistence that he never thinks about it, he’s like anyone else. He thinks about it, and he goes back and forth, although lately it has looked more like “forth” than “back.”

Of course, if the Lakers blow to bits in the interim, it won’t be a hard decision, will it?

“That’s something I’m sure, as we go through the rest of the season, we’re going to have to cross that bridge together as a team,” Coach Phil Jackson said last week, breaking his long silence on the issue.

“How attached can a team be if they feel like a member, [who’s] as important as Kobe is, is possibly going to leave the ballclub? It feels like there’s something disloyal about it or something. And I think you have to recognize those feelings and talk about them as a basketball club.

“Kobe has said that’s going to fall out. He gave us that assurance early in the season that whatever happens at the end of the season, that’s going to fall out.

“He’s here now, ready to play and win a championship with these guys, and he’s stated that fact to the team.”

Of course, Jackson’s future is also in question. His contract runs out July 1 too, and the team just broke off extension talks, which had been thought to be amicable and routine.

With his remarkable talent for keeping order amid chaos, Jackson has been their linchpin. After the Lakers blew up annually in their previous three seasons with O’Neal and Bryant, getting booted out of the playoffs, 4-1, 4-0 and 4-0, Jackson took them to three titles.

The news was only the latest suggestion that the Lakers, who had been merely zany, which is what you call teams that act erratically but win, were now tumbling out of control.

The team notified the media of the impasse with Jackson on last week’s trip, just when everyone thought that anything that could go wrong already had.

Of course, the Lakers could have just kept it to themselves but announced it, they said, because they didn’t want it to become -- you won’t believe this -- a distraction.

In eight seasons with O’Neal and Bryant, the Lakers have known little but distractions. The only difference now is they have Karl Malone and Gary Payton, giving them the greatest array of talent ever assembled, and bigger distractions.

Something momentous beckons, be it a restoration of the dynasty or the mother of all implosions. This could be four titles in five seasons or the greatest NBA pratfall ever, eclipsing the fall of the 1968-69 Lakers of Jerry West, Elgin Baylor and Wilt Chamberlain, then considered the greatest array of talent ever assembled.

Those Lakers went up in smoke against the Celtics in Game 7 of the Finals, under the balloons owner Jack Kent Cooke penned to the Forum ceiling for the victory celebration, after Chamberlain took himself out in the fourth quarter and Coach Butch van Breda Kolff wouldn’t let him go back in.

Before that debacle, the Lakers demonstrated their lack of cohesion with a modest 55-27 finish. In other words, it was a season almost as weird as this one.

Storied as they may be, the Lakers are the subplot now. Bryant, facing a trial on a sexual assault charge, is the story and they’re the stage.

It’s all tangled up. Just as Bryant approaches the pivotal moment of his life, up pops his opt-out clause, which means he’s now deciding the direction of his career too!

So there’s the old second-half question of whether the Lakers can pull it together.

After that, we can get to the big one, what happens to Bryant, in life and in basketball?

And, by the way, will we ever see the Lakers as currently constituted again?

Shaq and Awe

“I had a dream that jealousy

Was a thing of the past

And we all understood

It’s all vanity and it won’t last.”

-- “Visions,” Kobe Bryant

If all this sounds familiar, it should. This verse from a song on Bryant’s rap album, “K.O.B.E.,” was excerpted by Sports Illustrated’s Ian Thomsen for an article in 2000.

Once again, the Lakers are the team everyone fears and admires. As Dallas Coach Don Nelson noted early this season when they were walking over all comers, “On the same team, they got four of the best players in the league at their position. Hello? Anybody home?”

Once again, a funny thing happened on the Lakers’ way to immortality. The euphoria faded, the injuries hit, and Slava Medvedenko, Kareem Rush, Luke Walton, Horace Grant, Bryon Russell, Brian Cook and Jamal Sampson made 53 starts.

Proving it wasn’t just about injuries, O’Neal and Bryant returned before their last trip, but not the euphoria.

Bryant left again after cutting his finger, he said, in a garage accident.

O’Neal sat out the game in Indiana, which became a 13-point loss, for cursing on TV.

Payton said he’d speak to Shaq, or “Big,” as he called him, about his decorum, which was funny, because Payton is a legend as a trash-talker.

Payton was ejected nine minutes into the next game at Philadelphia. As the irrepressible Grant mused, passing press row during the 21-point loss, “And the hits just keep on coming!”

As usual, Jackson barely registered surprise when one of his stars turned up missing, however bizarre or absurd the pretext, but he was obviously beginning to wonder about it.

“I don’t think there’s a place we can start, where things are,” Jackson said in Orlando, while Ritz-Carlton security threw up a defensive perimeter as if they were the Rolling Stones.

“Things are never at any spot. It’s like quicksand. We’re always sinking one level deeper or one stratum to go before we know what’s at the bottom.”

Amazingly, the Lakers of recent seasons looked volatile but were stable enough to come together. These Lakers look solid but are volatile because of the options Bryant and O’Neal now contemplate, such as a future without each other.

Camp opened with Bryant fuming at O’Neal for not being more supportive. For his part, O’Neal hated the prospect of all the media heat he’d have to endure because of Bryant.

O’Neal also knew he no longer needed Bryant as he had and began zinging away in private and in public, as when he said, “The whole team is here,” before Bryant arrived.

Bryant, who’d never been thin-skinned but had recently been telling team officials he wasn’t going to take any flak from O’Neal, now ranted privately he was leaving because of him.

Shaq heard about it and zinged Kobe anew. Kobe torched Shaq publicly on the eve of the opener.

The miracle was that they managed to put it behind them, zooming to an 18-3 start while the Big Four showed how easily they could play together if they felt like it.

Nevertheless, Bryant looked more like the pre-Jackson Kobe, taking over at the end of games, oblivious to teammates. As one asked, “What are we, robots?”

However, discordant issues were played down, a distinct change for the Lakers. According to their new code, they owed Malone and Payton for taking millions less to come and couldn’t be doing their old number in the papers. Jackson, who had always acknowledged problems, obliging everyone to deal with them, turned protective, letting Bryant hoist away without comment.

So their struggles continued along with the usual blithe reassurance that they’d be all right at the end, which was, once again, repeated and probably believed by every coach who was about to play them.

Nevertheless, the Lakers worried.

After a mid-January loss in Minnesota, Payton blurted, “I didn’t sign up for this ... ,” although he wouldn’t say just what it was he hadn’t signed up for.

“I’m concerned that the story of our season is these incidents,” Rick Fox said last week. “Shaq’s suspension, Kobe’s finger, Kobe’s off-court situation, injuries, all of the things that weigh on you as a group....

“This is the regular season, and here it is. We’re splintering physically, mentally. We’re splintering in so many different ways that don’t even involve the pressure of big-time basketball....

“I think that’s the danger in having put together a team that’s so impressive on paper, four Hall of Famers coming.... If you think you’re going to pull together in 10 games, 15 games and be able to win a championship, we’re setting ourselves up.”

At Houston, where the team announced the end of negotiations with Jackson until summer, Bryant was asked for his opinion, and said, “I don’t care.”

Heading into the All-Star media availability, this was like jumping into the sea to deliver steaks to the sharks.

“My first stint here, the little feud was going on with the big two [O’Neal and Bryant],” said Grant, comparing the Lakers with his Bull teams, who were masters of disaster in their day.

“We had a few problems in Chicago also, but we kind of kept them in the house.”

Grant laughed.

“Not in Laker land.”

Keeping It Unreal

“It has been a stressful first half of the season, but you know what? When I step out there on the basketball court, it’s so much fun. So much fun. So that makes it better.”

-- Bryant, last week

That’s one of the few things Bryant has said lately that I would take at face value.

With Bryant exasperated and lots of people in and around the Lakers feeling worn out by him, I’m one of the last holdouts. I don’t have to be there every day, I’ve always been on good terms with him and I can still see the young, sweet-tempered Kobe in there, even if he’s hanging on for dear life and the question of what happened in Colorado is unresolved.

If the stuff about wanting to remain a Laker has an element of truth, it’s not the whole truth. They can pay him more than anyone else, and their offer is still on the table, but he continues to hold one little thing back: the commitment.

On the other hand, this is how the business works. Superstars get to choose, according to their whims. Everyone else -- teams, fans, media -- has to deal it.

In 1996, O’Neal said he wanted to stay in Orlando and was sincere (he had just built a mansion where he still goes in summer and had moved his family to town), right up to the end when he got upset at the Magic and signed with the Lakers.

At 25, Bryant is married and has a child, but in important ways remains a child, trying to arrive at an adult’s sense of the world, and it’s not hard to see why.

Reviled as he may be, sliding down the pyramid as he has, as when McDonald’s recently let his contract expire quietly, he remains one of the NBA’s few impact players, with all that entails.

Over the All-Star break, the Deseret News of Salt Lake City and the Denver Post reported that the Jazz and Nuggets, respectively, have made Bryant their No. 1 objective this summer, joining previously reported suitors such as the Clippers, Spurs and Hawks.

Salt Lake City and Denver happen to be the two cities in which Bryant received the most raucous booing from fans, and even if he pretended he didn’t care, he did.

Everyone is so used to seeing him contain his emotions and perform at his breathtaking level, as he did en route to the 2001 title while packing his family off in a dispute about his engagement, they think he’s a superman.

Up close, the wonder is always how young he seems. He’s like your paperboy, the idol.

As former teammate Ron Harper said, anyone else going through what Bryant is would be curled up on his couch. Instead, Kobe tries to right his world by returning to his routine. This is the O.J. Simpson case, without the capital charge, but with the immediacy of a defendant who’s still an active superstar.

The lesson we could have learned from Simpson was how little we know about these people we see all the time. The lesson turned out to be that celebrities in trouble got huge ratings, starting the cottage industry that produced shows such as “Celebrity Justice.”

Now, it has devolved to this: Harvey Levin of “Celebrity Justice,” interviewed about Bryant’s latest court appearance by KRTH-FM deejay Gary Bryan on the local oldies station.

Celebrities are as much fodder for Bryan as for Jay Leno or David Letterman. Bryan does riffs on stars in trouble or in politics (especially opponents of the Iraq war, at least during the war), which may be more than you bargained for between the Ronettes and Gladys Knight and the Pips.

Everything is processed by the media and comes out as entertainment, trivializing it. Now there are various modes of reality, none of them real. Reality TV is staged. Virtual reality is electronic impulses converted to lifelike images on a computer screen.

Meanwhile, Bryant’s life is real but impenetrable. The only part we know about is the part that shows, when he’s a Laker.

His situation, of course, poses a huge problem for the Lakers, with no easy answers, such as the talk-show favorite, trading him for Houston’s Steve Francis, who recently had a spat with Coach Jeff Van Gundy.

For one thing, Francis is a base-year player, making him hard to trade under salary-cap rules.

For another, who says the Rockets want to trade for a player about to stand trial?

Despite all the talk about whose team this is, it belongs to Jerry Buss, and if he chooses between O’Neal and Bryant, he loses. General Manager Mitch Kupchak insisted again Monday that they have no intention of trading Bryant, who so captures the flashy style Buss demands, the owner recently said he was “like my son.”

Buss has been synonymous with the Lakers for 25 years and has the organizational bias. After so many successes, he can’t imagine things going really badly for them.

Of course, it’s not hard to imagine Bryant a year from now, playing somewhere else, thinking, “What have I done?”

It’s also not hard to imagine O’Neal, a year from now, missing Bryant more than he thinks he will now.

Improbable or not, there’s a way out: Bryant can start accommodating teammates, as he has done before at the end of stormy seasons, on and off the floor.

O’Neal can change the atmosphere. Instead of sitting back and enjoying the spectacle of Bryant on his way out, he can invite Kobe to stay in a meaningful way, publicly and privately. As Fox once noted, the two big guys care more about what the other thinks than either would ever admit.

Of course, it would also help if Buss got to a better place with Jackson, who has held his team together for so long and is the only man who has a chance now.

In December, Jackson said he was “confident” Bryant would stay, but that seems like an eternity ago.

Asked last week, Jackson said, “Well, let’s take the word confident out of it....

“It [the season] is different than the different I thought it was going to be. There’s no doubt about it. You know, injuries happen, but the Haitian voodoo witchcraft priest that has the doll and is putting pins in somewhere down in the Dominican Republic can release that image and let the Laker doll go....

“We’ve had enough of our share of misfortunes to last us for a season. It’s time for us to get our team together so that we can play.

“I think we still have a good chance. I still feel that we’re like odds-on favorite to still be the team of destiny.”

Three days later, the story of the break-off of Jackson’s negotiations surfaced.

Their destiny is definitely awaiting them, whether it’s the one they want or not.