Kobe’s 41 Not Enough for Streak or Lakers

The rain certainly didn’t go away here, but Kobe Bryant’s point-scoring spree dried up.

Bryant’s side-by-side run with history evaporated with a 41-point effort in a 113-103 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers on Wednesday at the Rose Garden.

Bryant’s four-game run of 45 points or more had put him in the same historical sentence as Elgin Baylor and Wilt Chamberlain, but the Trail Blazers weren’t as generous defensively as the Lakers, who gave the league’s lowest-scoring team its highest offensive output of the season.

Starting guards Juan Dixon had 27 points and Steve Blake had 19 for the Trail Blazers, who ended a six-game losing streak by doing significantly better than the 87-point average they had coming into the game.

Laker Coach Phil Jackson called it a “lack of respect,” with little or no argument.

“When you have guards like Dixon and Blake basically having career nights, that really sets you on edge as a team,” Jackson said. “That’s not the thrust of their scoring. We didn’t come out with the intent to play defense tonight.”

And Bryant didn’t quite have the same shooting success that led him to totals of 45, 48, 50 and 45 over his previous four games, a point-scoring plateau reached by only Baylor and Chamberlain before him.

“I don’t really care,” Bryant said of the streak’s end. “It doesn’t matter to me at all.”

Bryant made 13 of 29 shots and had three assists and two rebounds in 44 minutes.

“We got in a situation tonight where I think Kobe’s waiting for his hand to get hot and it never happened,” Jackson said. “We tried to force the ball into him in situations that we shouldn’t have and it cost us as a team because we didn’t get other people involved as a result.

“As a result, I think we were standing flat-footed at the other end of the floor defensively.”

Bryant took a shot at the Laker defense when asked by a reporter from a teen channel what “young people could learn” from how the Lakers played Wednesday night.

“Play defense,” he said. “Do not stink it up in the defensive end or you will not win.”

Portland appeared to be in jeopardy in the beginning, with leading scorer Zach Randolph benched for the start of the game because he was late for Wednesday morning’s shoot-around. The penalty was short-lived: He finished with 17 points and 14 rebounds in 44 minutes.

And things looked a little less bleak for the locals in Portland, where it had rained 23 of the last 24 days and newspaper headlines greeted readers with such dour predictions as “Hoods up, heads down for six more soaking days.”

“Before the game, Coach [Nate McMillan] drew a big heart on the chalkboard,” Dixon said. “He wanted to see what we were made of.”

The Trail Blazers had won only 10 of 34 games before Wednesday.

More discouraging numbers: The Lakers made only four of 21 three-point attempts, Bryant only three of 13.

“Obviously when they’re not going in, then it’s time to stop,” Jackson said. “We kept going.”

It could have been worse for Bryant and the Lakers. Bryant was poked in the right eye by Ruben Patterson as the Blazer forward drove the lane with 7:27 to play. Bryant remained crumpled on the court for almost two minutes but did not leave the game after a 20-second timeout.

Still, Bryant did not have a field goal in the fourth quarter until making a three-point shot with 6:14 to play.

That it might be the end of Bryant’s scoring spree was slightly evident after the first quarter, when he had six points, two fewer than Brian Cook.

Bryant had 23 points at halftime and 28 after three quarters.

In the end, he almost picked up another, less notable, piece of history, falling one point shy of the Rose Garden record for points in a regular-season game.