Drama Still There, but Games Are the Reality

NEW ORLEANS —  Other than the soft rustling of reporters when Kobe Bryant wanders through the locker room, the Lakers appear to have made it through the season’s break-in period, which is not to say all is normal.

Six games in, five wins in, a drama or two in, disorder lingers, but for the moment it is not smothering.

Bryant has a legal hearing in Colorado at 9 a.m. Thursday, when he could enter a plea in his sexual assault case. The Lakers play Wednesday night and Friday night in Los Angeles. Eagle, Colo., is a 90-minute flight.

He presumably would miss a practice Thursday, though the organization will wait to learn what the hearing means for his participation in Wednesday’s game against the Toronto Raptors, or his focus in Friday’s game against the Detroit Pistons.

Grain by grain, however, their thoughts and conversations have turned to basketball, to the integration of Karl Malone and Gary Payton, and away from Bryant’s ordeal or what it is that stands between Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal.

While it will be a season played in the presence of all that Bryant carries, it will be a season played, a reality made clearer as the games came harder and faster over the last week.

The first physical strain arrived sometime in the third quarter Friday, the Lakers having played to a one-point lead against Baron Davis’ New Orleans Hornets, their heads having pushed their legs that far. Then they crashed. In the final 21 minutes, the Lakers were nine for 31 from the field, one for 13 on three-point shots, and committed seven turnovers.

Phil Jackson cut bait, didn’t play Malone, 40, in the fourth quarter and played Payton, 35, for 1:27. The Lakers were outrun, outrebounded, outshot and out-thought for the first time as Lords of the Basketball Universe, and then they bore the loss with more regret than one would expect. They did not like the way they had played, the loss exposing the gradual decline of their perimeter defense and the wall they’d hit in triangle execution.

“Every one of us should go back and look at the defensive part of it to see what we didn’t do right,” Malone said. “That’s where we start. We’re going to make baskets, shooting the ball and all that. We’ve got enough firepower to make baskets. It’s just [opponents] are making layups, driving to the basket. That’s just communicating. It’s just like us talking on the bus. We laugh and joke and talk on the bus and in the locker room. We’ve got to get used to doing that on the basketball court. When we do that, we’ll be a really good defensive team. Right now, teams are going where they want to go. That’s unacceptable and we have to correct that.”

Malone appears to be becoming the Laker conscience, sitting as he does after games, up to his shins in ice water, answering questions with eye contact and honesty. Closer perhaps than any of them to the end of a career, Malone sits in a room with 21 championship rings, none of them his, and that seems to drive his every decision.

So, he said, he is trying to connect with people, quickly.

“Guys, coaches, everybody,” he said. “I got to do it all at one time. I’ve never had to do so much thinking. I’d been in one situation for so long, it just came natural.

“It’s all part of it. Comes at a hell of a time, you know, but just one of those things.”

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Rather than fly to Memphis, Tenn., where the Lakers play Monday night, Jackson opted to take the extra day in New Orleans, which meant a Saturday night on Bourbon Street, if preferred, rather than Beal Street.... After four games in which his knee and conditioning appeared to improve by the night, Bryant was floor-bound for most of Friday’s loss. Jackson said he was through measuring Bryant’s minutes, however. “I’m not thinking about it as a coach,” he said. “I’m looking at it when he ices his leg after a game and asking him how he held up. But that’s about it.”