Lakers Are Royally Flush

Into some gray sweats at the end of a day that began 18 hours before, Kobe Bryant said what they all thought, that this was never about the Sacramento Kings, not since the day Gary Payton and Karl Malone arrived, and maybe not since Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal arrived.

“If anything,” Bryant said, “we made a statement to ourselves, that we’re capable.”

If they had forgotten, or misplaced, their expectations, there would be this Wednesday night at Staples Center: Lakers 115, Kings 91, with three weeks remaining in the regular season.

“You can’t underestimate the intensity of this ballclub and their intention to play up to a certain level,” Coach Phil Jackson said. “They really want to play at a certain level and we just seemed to be getting in our own way. Now that Karl’s back in the lineup, it gives us renewed confidence that we can do this.”

The Lakers added Bryant to their locker room less than an hour before game time, gave the basketball to Payton and ran the weary Kings off the floor.

A team that thinks of the regular season as little more than a nuisance, the Lakers found a March game they could love and outrebounded the Kings by 22 and outscored them in the paint by 30.

After rising in the early-morning hours in Newport Beach and attending a pretrial hearing in Eagle, Colo., Bryant flew two hours, rushed to the arena, made his way through the hallways and scored 36 points. He’ll return to Eagle this morning.

“The basketball,” Bryant said, “is like a getaway.”

Payton, the ball in his hands again and in the low post against Mike Bibby, scored 20 points.

O’Neal had 17 points and 16 rebounds, continuing his recent attention to rebounding. Malone scored 11 points, and defended Chris Webber with great energy.

With 11 games to play, the Lakers are two losses behind the Kings in both the division and the Western Conference, and even in losses with the Minnesota Timberwolves, who come to Staples on Friday, giving the Lakers another late-season shot at reaching their potential.

The Lakers have won six in a row, but only the last impressively, both in terms of opponent and margin. Against a King team that had played the night before and often looked it, the Lakers led by as many as 30 points.

“I have been waiting for a game like that out of us for a long time,” O’Neal said. “We know that if we play like this we will be hard to beat. Everybody played well. Kobe came in and played fabulous after his long day.”

With a manic vibe, Bryant stepped to the floor.

For the first time since he sprained his right shoulder March 5 and returned three games later, he played with neither a pad nor a compression shirt to protect it.

Often coolly detached in the moments before the opening tip, Bryant danced lightly in place. And when the ball went live, Bryant came out, shot first and settled in second.

Before the first quarter was done, the Lakers led, 31-10, at the end of a 25-1 run. Bryant took nine shots in the quarter, including the first two of the game, both long jumpers that were good, inspiring the crowd. It appeared he not only tried to shoot himself into the game, but back into the life he recognized, away from early-morning flights and agonizing hearings.

“It’s fun to get out on the court and play basketball,” he said, about four hours from his next alarm clock. “I feel OK right now.”

At the end of the quarter, three or four standing ovations in, the lead was 33-14, and the crowd was up again, having seen enough mediocre basketball in the last months to be thrilled by 12 minutes of improvement, and then 24, and then most of a full game.

That it was the Kings getting drubbed simply added to the mood of the building, which had seen five consecutive wins by the Lakers and 16 wins in 20 games since the All-Star break, but nothing like this.

The Lakers played without Horace Grant, whose hip won’t be ready to be tested until next week. And King guard Bobby Jackson, the reserve guard whose quickness and scoring is a Laker nuisance, won’t play until Sunday at the earliest.

And, while the knees of Malone (right) and Webber (left) aren’t quite right, this would be as close to healthy as the two Western Conference Goliaths would be in three meetings.

The Kings won the first two games. And while they led the division by 3 1/2 games when they arrived, they’d also struggled recently, particularly with Webber in the lineup. They have lost five of eight games, including Tuesday night at home to the Milwaukee Bucks.

In the hours after the Kings last played in Los Angeles, a game that ended in a two-point King win and 31 points for Bibby, Payton complained about his place in the offense, about a game plan that did not allow him, in his agent’s words, “to be Gary.”

On Wednesday, with the Lakers hoping to play well not only to win, but for the sake of playing well, Phil Jackson allowed Payton to work Bibby on both ends of the court.

Perhaps conflicted -- he might have liked to save the strategy for the playoffs, for greater impact -- Jackson knew Payton’s pride needed Bibby, and Jackson gave him to him.

“It’s not so alien to our offense that we can’t accommodate that,” Jackson said. “We thought it was probably important in this game because of the way Bibby played the last game against us on this court, for him to face some defensive pressure right away in this ballgame.”