Bryant Can Travel With Team

Kobe Bryant will attend practice today and is expected on the team’s chartered flight to San Antonio this afternoon, after Judge Terry Ruckriegle’s decision to cancel today’s pretrial hearing in Eagle, Colo.

It had been assumed that Bryant, who pleaded not guilty to felony sexual assault in Ruckriegle’s courtroom Tuesday, would have to meet the Lakers in San Antonio, either tonight or Thursday morning.

“He has a recovery day here, which sometimes he didn’t have during the course of the season,” Coach Phil Jackson said. “There’ll be some more cohesiveness to the way it’s going to work out.”

Bryant left the Eagle County courthouse at about 2:35 p.m. Mountain time on Tuesday. About three hours later, his car pulled into the underground lot at Staples Center, where Bryant was said to have napped for about an hour.

In the middle of another arduous day, Bryant stepped into the locker room at 5:19 p.m. and at 6:35 he sent a locker-room employee to bring his uniform and warmups into the players’ lounge, where he would change.

Jackson said he had not watched the proceedings that were replayed during the afternoon, but that various televisions throughout the Laker practice facility were tuned to the news. Several hours after saying, “Not guilty,” Bryant prepared to play basketball.

Ruckriegle added a May 27 hearing, when he could set a trial date. It would fall during the Western Conference finals.

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Still separating the perception of his “This is it” speech from his intentions, Jackson gathered his players during Tuesday afternoon’s shoot-around and tried again to explain that he might, indeed, return next season.

Jackson said that he had not meant to imply he would not return to the Lakers under any circumstances. He said he had merely laid out the possibility that many of them, including himself, could be in their final weeks -- or days -- in the organization.

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Despite the glut of open coaching jobs in the NBA and Jackson’s tenuous contract situation, Jackson’s assistants -- Kurt Rambis, Jim Cleamons and Frank Hamblen -- have not been advised by Jackson to seek other opportunities.

“We haven’t talked in those terms,” Jackson said.

Rambis is said to be high on the list of one NBA general manager currently evaluating his head coach.