Kobe assists, D'Antoni backs off - The story of how the Lakers finally turned it around

What happens when you build a super car and leave two headstrong individuals to fight it out over who will drive it? You crash the car into one smouldering flame wreck of a car accident.

This season started off with such promise. Five men got into a car a few months ago. The car was of supreme build. It was faster than any car ever built. It held the promise which these men had been chasing for all their careers. It would take them to the promised land. The car started with the five men and a driver. After a few kilometres, the driver was unceremoniously kicked out of the car as the passenger in the front seat began to grapple with the steering wheel with him, hitting passer-bys left, right and centre. Whatever a car does, it’s the driver who is blamed. So the driver was jettisoned in favour of another who was picked up from the roadside. The passengers were all clutching at each other in total panic and screaming at the passenger up front to get his hands off the steering wheel. That man, let’s call him Kobe, snarled and told them all to shut up. The same thing continued to happen for the next 40 kilometres, with the passengers sustaining bruises all around but the driver, let’s call him Mike’ D’Antoni and Kobe, both refusing to give an inch. Imagine having a top notch car and having it bump into all obstacles because two headstrong individuals won’t let go of the steering wheel. That’s what the Lakers were.

Now, they have changed the steering wheel to a panel of controls accessible to the entire population inside the car, with everyone uniquely responsible for carrying their own share of weight. That’s what the Lakers have been doing in the last two games.

I never tired of pointing out that Kobe takes more shots than Steve Nash, Pau Gasol and Dwight Howard combined on most nights. He alone wasn’t at fault for the Lakers’ struggle. Their coach, Mike D’Antoni was also pushing the issue by making the team run ‘his offence’; making them do it ‘his way’. Now both men have come to an understanding, although they arrived at it in different ways, that the best thing they can do is let go.

It was a dark, stormy night when the Mamba was slithering along the green grass for his daily run. He had just finished biting the heads of his teammates off, figuratively, and had promised to do so literally if in the next game they exhibited the same incompetence. How hard, the Mamba argued, how hard can it be to just give him the ball on every possession and get out of his way? And would it kill Howard to stop being a hunchback about his back? Could Pau Gasol be any softer? The Mamba had multiple variations on that theme – GaSoft, floppy haired Marshmallow, and so on. And Steve, oh Steve! Talk about bait and switch. It’s like going to a blues concert and having Lil Wayne crash it and blast your eardrums with his ‘rap’. Never in history had someone arrived with such promise and delivered so little. The Mamba was still spewing venom while jogging, when he noticed bright lights illuminate his path. Mamba nodded to himself, thinking the Gods are enlightening his path ahead like they should. Suddenly, there was a magnetic pull which pulled the Mamba into the spaceship whereupon his soul was switched with the model of a ‘generic basketball player’ and his dark soul was kept in a jar for the aliens to study. They had seen black holes and endless galaxies but never had they chanced upon anything so dark. A ‘generic basketball player’ soul entered Kobe’s body and played a couple of basketball games the way it’s meant to be played, getting more assists than shot attempts. While that wouldn’t happen in an average game, when your teammates are hall of fame athletes, it’s nothing out of the ordinary. Ball boys whom the Mamba had sent into therapy for not rebounding well for him returned to their jobs, gay and merry. Dwight Howard started smiling again, Pau Gasol’s pillow ceased to be wet with tears. And thus, order was restored and one of the potential best teams ever finally came to realise its potential.

That Kobe Bryant has been abducted and replaced by aliens is far more likely than what he has been doing. Out of the 1025 career games Kobe has played, there have only been three instances before games number 1024 and 1025 when he played for more than 30 minutes and had more assists than field goals. In the last two games, Kobe Bryant has had 14 assists in each game and he’s had fewer field goal attempts than assists.

The maths has been simple this season. The Lakers are 13-3 when Kobe Bryant takes 19 or fewer shots in the game, and 6-22 when he takes 20 or more shots. The Lakers have lost 19 of their first 44 games. It was about time a change happened.

Nobody really knows how the change came about. Maybe Jack Nicholson got tired of watching this on the sideline and threatened to become a Clipper fan. Maybe Pau Gasol and Dwight Howard ambushed Kobe after practice and hit him over the head with a hammer, causing amnesia to the part of the brain which was responsible for jacking up shots. Maybe Mike D’Antoni hired a hypnotist to hypnotise Kobe Bryant and make him not take contested fadeaways while being triple teamed. It would probably take an exorcist to do that.

“This isn’t necessarily any offence,” Nash said after the Lakers’ 105-96 win over the Oklahoma City Thunder on Sunday. “This is bringing the ball down, calling over a pick and playing the game and because we have good players on the floor, when (Bryant) distributes we can make them pay for leaning too much to Kobe. When they lean too much to us, he makes them pay.”

One realistic reason we can point to for this change, has been Mike D’Antoni loosening the leash which he had tied like a suicide rope around this team. In the interim period between Mike Brown’s firing and Mike D’Antoni’s hiring, the Lakers went 4-1 under Bernie Bickerstaff. Bernie inspired the coaching staff to bicker and was replaced by D’Anotni, but not before Bickerstaff had notched up the highest winning percentage in Lakers’ history, albeit only in five games. What worked for him was that he got out of the way of the Lakers on offence and just let them play. Which is what Mike D’Antoni has done at long last.

These last two games have been an outlier. The Lakers are averaging 103.5 points per game while shooting a combined 84-for-154 from the field (54.5 percent) and have had five players with 14 points or more against the Jazz and six players in double figures against the Thunder.

“We listen. But we’re the guys out there playing. We see things that sometimes the coaches may not see. (D’Antoni is) telling us to go but sometimes you can’t get those engines to start up that fast,” said Dwight Howard. I’m still apprehensive of a flare up between Kobe and Dwight, when he says quotes like these – “I think for a lot of bigs, when we’re fed and we eat a little bit, we’re happy,” Howard said on Saturday. “Just like men. Give us some food, we’re good. We don’t eat, we’re grumpy.”

That’s exactly what Howard comes across as. Howard comes up with the best analogies. By his description, he’s describing the behaviour of a toddler more than a man. Let me emphasise this, Howard needs to be an alpha dog. He needs to stop asking and start demanding, within limits. That right there was Howard’s dog version, asking for food (passes). Can you imagine Kobe’s dog version? I’ll save you the trouble, here it is -

That is how Dwight Howard has to be – to not make it seem like Kobe is sacrificing his statistics and doing the Lakers a favour. “I don’t know if it was a sacrifice, but (Bryant) set the tone. There’s no doubt about it. He played like Oscar Robertson played back in the day — 14 assists, nine rebounds, and he got easy shots all over the place,” D’Antoni said. To make this good Kobe stick around, his teammates need to continue to step up.

Such hue and cry is being made of Kobe assisting, we forget that last decade there was a player who notched back to back seasons with 30+ points and 7+ assists. Allen Iverson always distributed the ball while scoring, and now Kobe needs to get into that mentality. “You have to figure out a way to win ball games, and that’s what I drew from. It seems like we’re starting to come up with our identity and what we’re going to become,” Kobe said. If he keeps this up, it will be a thing of beauty to watch this Lakers team go to work, unlike the dysfunctional train wreck they have been.

That is the beauty of what the Lakers can become. Let’s hope it lasts.