Privately, people wonder: How many more passes does
Kobe
Bryant(notes)
give
Pau
Gasol(notes)
for speaking so boldly about him? How long until Bryant’s public and
private reprisal comes with a ferocity that could bring a 7-footer to
his knees? All season, Gasol has been a relentlessly consistent, if not
passively aggressive, critic of the franchise star’s shooting habits, of
an offense that doesn’t deliver him the ball with the frequency that he
wants.
Whatever the reasons, Gasol has been emboldened to speak his mind.
Whatever the odds, Bryant has bit his lip and let it go.
“I believe in what I believe,” Gasol said.
Hours before Friday night’s victory over the
Phoenix
Suns, chatting on a chair inside U.S. Airways Center, Bryant let
out a laugh and insisted there will be no public rebuttals. “I’m not
touching that,” Bryant said with a smile and shrug.
Bryant could come out and say that Gasol had never won a playoff game
until arriving to the Lakers. He could tell Gasol that the Lakers still
had the NBA’s best record without him for a month to start the season.
He could tell him to make a free throw in the last minutes of tough
games, tell him to toughen up.
Truth be told, Kobe Bryant could tell Pau Gasol to simply shut the
bleep up.
Only, Bryant doesn’t do it. Tempted? Well, of course. Yet, the reason
for such restraint is simple: The Lakers desperately need Gasol, and a
public chastising of him would almost assuredly reduce his fragile
psyche to rubble, costing Bryant the player he needs to catch Michael
Jordan and his six championship rings
Perhaps circumstances have changed, but not him.
“Last year during our stretch run, Andrew [Bynum] wasn’t there ‘cause
of injury, so Pau got a lot more touches,” Bryant told Yahoo! Sports.
“And this year, we’ve got to kind of split the difference between those
two. Now, any of those guys can have a big night. Andrew had one the
other night. Lamar [Odom] can have a big night. And Pau can have a big
night.
“Some nights you get a lot of touches, some nights you don’t.”
Such patience out of Bryant, such perspective. Years ago, this
wouldn’t have happened. He would have blasted Gasol into oblivion. No
more. Everyone has watched and listened to Gasol take these little shots
along the way, beginning with Bryant’s pursuit of Jerry West’s Lakers
scoring record and continuing several times over.
Nevertheless, Bryant has been nurturing, not narcissistic. So when
there was a game on the line Friday night, Kobe had the capital to slap
Gasol upside the head in the fourth quarter, a kind of nurturing,
go-get-‘em moment that preceded an improbable stand by the Lakers
frontline.
Moments later, Gasol would flex those skinny arms and crush Phoenix’s
Louis
Amundson(notes)
upside the head on a drive to the rim. The foul sent Suns coach Alvin
Gentry into a rage, costing him two technical fouls, an ejection and
perhaps ultimately a 102-96 loss.
“Pau gave a hard foul, which is what we like to see from him,” Bryant
said.
These are the small victories which assemble one on top of another: A
hard foul here, clutch basket there. This is the reason the Bryant
dictatorship has allowed such dissident talk out of Gasol. Maybe it
emboldens Gasol. Maybe it leaves Gasol thinking that’s he standing up to
Bryant, standing tough. This week started with Gasol reiterating his
issues with Bryant shooting too much and ended with a savvy 21 points,
10 rebounds and eight assists from Bryant.
Four straight road losses had everyone doubting the Lakers’ resolve,
and with Bryant’s mangled finger reaggravated, with that bum ankle
acting up, he’s never needed so much out of his teammates. So, whatever
momentary satisfaction might come out of a public obliteration from
Gasol’s emboldened mouth, the harshest consequences would ultimately be
meted out to Bryant. This has been the evolution of Kobe. All those
years of raging against the machine, of a genius talent forever trying
to control the inner rage that ruled him, Kobe discovered the proper way
to harness it.
“I’ve definitely seen the growth,”
Derek
Fisher(notes)
said. “We’ve talked about it. It’s something that he’s very conscious
of. He lives, breathes, digests every aspect of his game, our team’s
game and what’s necessary to win. He’s very aware of what needs to
happen on and off the court for us to be successful.”
Where did Bryant change in that way? Well, it had to be
Shaquille
O’Neal’s(notes)
derisive rap and Bryant’s ultimate reaction: silence. At the Beijing
Olympics, on the eve of his 30th birthday, Bryant told me that his big
mistake earlier in his career was always coming up with a rebuttal for
Shaq. “My philosophy had always been to keep quiet and not to say
anything,” he said. “And by me responding, that drew me into it. If I
had to do it over again, I would’ve just let people talk and say what
they had to say, and as time goes, they would’ve seen what was what.
“When you’re young, [you think], ‘Enough is enough. I’m going to say
something.’ And all of a sudden …”
All of a sudden you’ve created a distraction, a needless opponent.
Bryant had endless energy in his 20s, but everything comes harder now.
Everything comes with emerging doubts, with a suggestion that
LeBron
James(notes)
has passed him, that the game’s greatest player is, well, no longer the
game’s greatest player. Bryant isn’t chasing Jay-Z as his model, but
rather M.J. He wants fists full of rings. He’s trying to get between
Jordan’s six titles and Bill Russell’s 11. He’s trying to create a
championship legacy that no player of his generation can call his own.
Even so, this has been a season of doubting Bryant. Before the
All-Star break, with Kobe finally resting an ankle injury, you couldn’t
listen to Southern California sports-talk radio without the most
preposterous premise being peddled on the airwaves: Look at the way
these Lakers play without Bryant, look at the ball movement, look at how
they’re better without him. The Lakers won a few games without Kobe,
and somehow that became an indictment of his greatness. Pure folly.
“A lot of times they run out of things to talk about,” Bryant said.
“They talk about things that have no relevance, that make no sense. They
forgot that last year, playing exactly the same way, we won a
championship. But they get excited about a four-game winning streak.
“…We have to focus on the big picture. That’s what I try to do.”
Someone close to Bryant suggested that his angry disposition after
beating Toronto on Wednesday with a fabulous fade-away was born of this
message: Don’t expect me to always bail everyone out. In some ways, the
Lakers take Bryant for granted, believing that he’ll always save them in
the final minutes.
“Yeah, sure,” Bryant agreed. “I’ve been in L.A. for 14 years now, and
I think people have gotten used to seeing me do things like that.”
The thirtysomething Bryant has discovered something the
twentysomething had a harder time with: Restraint can be his salvation.
This started with Shaq’s rap assault two years ago, where Bryant’s
non-response went against every fiber of his DNA. Yet it changed the
public dynamic of how people perceived the Shaq-Kobe feud, turned Kobe
into the grown-up and Shaq into the pesty, immature kid.
It did something else, too: It’s colored the way Bryant’s treated his
sidekick, Gasol. Make no mistake: Kobe has engendered Gasol with much
more public respect than Shaq ever did him. He hasn’t been condescending
to or belittling of him. Yes, he’ll go after Gasol and Bynum for
failing to play hard and tough and sustained. Basketball’s greatest
coaches are always the superstars who hold teammates accountable.
So, yes, when Gasol has been so publicly disparaging of Bryant’s mode
of attack, it naturally has to rankle him. Gasol did it on several
occasions this season, including after Sunday’s loss in Orlando. His
theme’s been wanting the ball, wanting Bryant to come inside with the
pass. “It’s nothing against Kobe or any individual here,” Gasol
insisted. “It’s all about our team success. I think he understands
that’s why I think that way, why I might say those things. There’s no
harm intended.”
No one is buying it, but whatever. Bryant is practicing a diplomacy
in his 30s which didn’t exist in his thermonuclear 20s. As Fisher
suggested, Bryant’s forever diagnosing his team and the climate in which
it exists.
These Lakers are 48-18 and have fallen three games behind the
Cleveland
Cavaliers for the best record in basketball. Looking back at
previous Lakers teams which tried to repeat as champions, Bryant said,
“This is kind of the typical malaise you go through this time of the
year waiting for the playoffs. The teams we had in the past went through
the same kind of lull. But ultimately we had a sense of urgency to get
out of it. But the jury is still out about whether we’re able to do
that.”
Between now and then, the increasingly benevolent dictatorship of
Kobe Bryant will allow its people freedom of speech. He thinks these
things through for hours upon hours, and Pau Gasol can have his say for
now. For his own sake, Gasol had better get it all out of his system and
deliver come May and June. Hell to pay then.
David Mikael Taclino
Inyu Web Development and Design
Creative Writer
