As Usual Kobe Stars In Hollywood Drama

Maybe Kobe Bryant just wanted to offer the Spurs a fair chance, like giving the outside lanes the staggered start on a 400-meter race.
The Spurs spent Monday night stuck on a grounded airplane after eliminating the Hornets in Game 7, and Wednesday night Bryant spent all but the final 89 seconds of the first half stuck on zero points.
He took five shots and scored four points through the first 2 ½ quarters and the Lakers, the highest-scoring team in the playoffs, had only 45 points.
There you go, Spurs. A 20-point lead. Sorry you had to sleep on a 727, but maybe that'll make it up to you. Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to score 23 points in the next 17 ½ minutes and we're going to come back and win Game 1 of the Western Conference finals 89-85.
Bryant made it look and sound just that easy, a matter of him doing what he wanted, when he chose to.
"Just had to pick up the game and get something going," he said afterward, casually. "That was my thinking.
"I knew I could make a push and once I made that push, it felt like it energized us a little bit, get the game back under control, get it under 10 where we knew we could be in striking distance. I just tried to read the flow of the game and tried to manage the game. I can get off at any time. In the second half I did that."
The game played out in a manner that fit the pre-game scenario. The still-in-a-rhythm Spurs came out sharper at the start. The Lakers, coming off four days of rest, had more energy at the end. It's just the extreme nature of the swings that seemed so unusual.
Bryant's devotion to teamwork reached the point that it was detrimental to the Lakers. Phil Jackson joked in an in-game interview that he "thought Kobe went on vacation", and he said afterward that, "He was doing some things good, but it had gotten us out of the rhythm during the course of the first half."
Bryant did have five assists at halftime, but it wasn't doing the Lakers much good. The Lakers might benefit from him sharing the ball, but the STAPLES Center crowd craves Bryant scoring explosions. You're much more likely to hear cries of "Come on, Kobe!" than Go Lakers" or "Defense!"
Bryant insisted he was "Just managing the game."
"Defensively is where we slipped. I've had games or halves when I've done that and we had a 15-point lead."
Sounding a little sensitive to how he'll be criticized equally for shooting too much or too little, he said if the Lakers hadn't played better defense to accompany his late scoring burst, "Everybody would be talking about I shot us out of the game. Defense is where it gets down."
The main thing the Lakers can take from this game is their defensive stops down the stretch. Something they had yet to prove they could do regularly in the playoffs.
The Lakers don't want to get in a habit of falling behind by 20, especially when the series goes to San Antonio. But there are a few things that aren't likely to repeat too often in this series, noticeably a 1-for-9 shooting night by Fisher (who was shooting 51 percent in the playoffs) and single digits across the board for Lamar Odom (he was averaging a double-double). So they're in great shape for the rest of this series.
Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich didn't see anything out of the ordinary for the first two quarters.
"Kobe was doing the trust-his-teammates thing in the first half," Popovich said. "He was checking it all out to see where his territory was going to be. And the second half he went to work."
The interesting thing was that Bryant didn't try to erase the entire 20-point lead on his own.
He kept going to his teammates, including three times when he went up for a jumper but wound up zipping the ball to Pau Gasol at the rim for layups and tap-ins.
And right after Odom missed a fast-break layup that could have tied the score, Bryant came down and gave him another chance. He threw the ball to Odom on the right block, then held out his left hand to keep his teammates in their places and let Odom go one-on-one. Odom backed down Michael Finley and made an awkward, twisting shot that bounced in."
So the Lakers experimented, stumbled, believed and prevailed. It wound up being the Lakers' largest playoff comeback since Game 4 of the 2002 Western Conference finals against Sacramento. You know, the one that ended like this. The one edge San Antonio had coming in was experience, but the Lakers just gained some.
"We are growing into the team we need to be," Fisher said.
Sorry, Spurs. Can't say you didn't have your chance.