COMMENTARY

By Jim Litke

updated 9:45 a.m. ET Jan. 27, 2006

Jim Litke

After making him the fall guy for the Lakers’ implosion, Phil Jackson made peace with Kobe Bryant. Shaq did, too, and in front of a national TV audience on Martin Luther King Day.

So what’s it going to take for the Kobe-haters left out there to do the same?

Judging by the reaction to Bryant’s 81-point performance against the defenseless Raptors in Hollywood the other night, the list is still long and filled with conflicting demands:

• Win another NBA championship by himself. Or else do it by making the players around him better.
• Score more and pass less. Or the other way around.
• Stand front and center in the league’s marketing campaign. Or hide.

It’s fair, but not entirely so, to argue that Bryant brought this on himself. Trying to be all things to all people is the surest way to disappoint most of them. He looked too polished as a teen prodigy, proved unconvincing as a family man, and he’s always been too calculating to cast in the role of good teammate.

But his biggest sin? It’s being every bit as good as Michael Jordan ever was, without understanding what made him great.

“Throughout my career, I’ve been compared to him so many times. I wish they’d stop,” he said after the game. “He was Michael Jordan and I am Kobe Bryant. We were different players. I wish people would let it go. It annoys me.

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“He’s one of the greatest of all time, if not the greatest, and for us in the younger generation — me and LeBron — to be compared to such greatness isn’t fair. It’s important for us to play the game we know how to play and let people sit back and enjoy what we do,” Bryant concluded, “and not compare it to what they have done.”

The public-service message was barely out of his mouth by the time Bryant knew lots of people had changed the channel. Yet you can’t do that when he’s on the court, and there aren’t more than a handful of players in the league at the moment about whom you can say the same.

Bryant is in the middle of a scoring streak so sublime that even Jackson, the ultimate consensus builder, has started coaching with his hands stuck in his pocket. He’s no longer whistling to get Bryant’s attention, nor pointing toward Lamar Odom, Kwame Brown, Chris Mihm or Smush Parker to indicate where he wants the ball to go. He’s folded up the triangle offense and dropped the responsibility for each and every game in Bryant’s lap.

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“To be honest with you,” Jackson said after the Toronto game, “that’s not exactly the way you want to have a team win a game. But when you have to win a game, it’s great to be able to have that weapon to do it with.”

It’s also, Jackson realizes, the only way the Lakers win any game these days. Over the last 15, stretching back to mid-December, Bryant has also pierced the 60-point barrier once, the 50s twice and the 40s on six occasions. He’s averaging 43 points and 28 shots a game.

And Jackson isn’t the only one who thinks Kobe should continue to get the green light. No less an authority on scoring than Jerry West recently told The Washington Post: “It’s so senseless to me to say he shouldn’t take over like that. You give the same amount of shots to everybody else and they’re not making that many, I know it.”

Still, it’s a measure of how polarizing a figure Bryant has become that every big performance occasions a debate.

When he reached 62 against the Dallas Mavericks a month ago, he begged off the chance to play the fourth quarter in a blowout, in the mistaken belief that some would interpret it as a selfless, sportsmanlike gesture. He got roasted instead. This time, he brought his team back from 18 points down, scored 55 in the second half alone — only a dozen during garbage time, with his teammates and everybody in the Staples Center except for the Raptors urging him on — and got roasted again.

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The irony is that this is exactly what Bryant coveted all along. It’s why he undermined Jackson the first time around and Shaquille O’Neal volunteered to leave town: so Bryant could inherit a team so lacking in options that he could call his own number every trip up the floor.

In a weird, harmonic convergence kind of way, it’s what Kobe-haters wanted for Bryant all along, too: wasting his absolute prime on a team just bad enough that even his best isn’t enough to put the Lakers over the top enough nights to make a difference.

So everybody’s happy.

Sort of.

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