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Kobe Bryant of the Lakers is overworked, writes NBCSports.com columnist Michael Ventre, and will join such players as Pete Maravich, Dominique Wilkins and Bernard King who were one-man shows that didn't have enough help to contend for a title.

I would be remiss in bemoaning Kobe’s excessive workload without chastising the slackers who comprise the rest of the roster.

Everyone seems to be waiting for the day when Lamar Odom breaks out and becomes the trusty No. 2 man to Kobe that Scottie Pippen was to Michael Jordan. It won’t happen. A player never rises above his own personality. Odom is certainly talented, but he’s also flaky and unfocused. While he has posted decent stats throughout his career, he rarely has an impact on a game. He’s like an auxiliary generator who only kicks in when the main source of power goes out, and even then he’s not reliable. Odom is in his seventh NBA season. If the light bulb hasn’t gone on yet, it never will. Two words: Trade bait.

The Lakers took a chance on young enigma Kwame Brown, and so far he’s been like Odom Lite. The five-year veteran appears even more disoriented and lacking in confidence than Odom. Brown is scheduled to miss the next two weeks with a hamstring, and the DNPs in the box score while he’s gone may represent his most positive contributions to date.

Chris Mihm is an excellent human being, but as Clint Eastwood once said in “Magnum Force”: “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Just about every man in the NBA who plays against the Lakers knows Mihm’s. Some nights he puts up decent numbers, other nights he’s invisible, but overall he’s rarely a factor in the outcome and is not a viable option to score at crunch time. This is his sixth NBA season, and like Odom, he is what he is and won’t transform into Moses Malone anytime soon.

The rest of the Lakers’ roster reads like an unprotected list for an expansion draft: Smush Parker, Devean George, Slava Medvedenko, Brian Cook, Sasha Vujacic, Laron Profit, Aaron McKie, Luke Walton, Devin Green and Von Wafer. Only 18-year-old Andrew Bynum, the team’s first-round pick last June, has sparked any kind of hope at all among the Lakers faithful, and that’s only because he plays five minutes a game and that’s too little time for anybody to predict if he’ll be a bust or not.

Not to beat up on Kobe, but this is what he wanted, and now he has it: Free reign. He was bashed enough last season, when the Lakers finished 34-48 and out of the playoffs in their first post-Shaq season, so I’ll resist the temptation here. What’s done is done.

But the Lakers have to do something about bringing in more talent and not making this another growing season, another nurturing and learning experience. Otherwise, they might find themselves filling out worker’s comp papers for their only star.

Imagine if Atlas had the weight of the world on his shoulders, and he climbed on Kobe Bryant’s back. That would be almost as heavy a load to bear as Bryant is dealing with now carrying the Lakers

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