The MVP (Most Vain Player) Sinks the Lakers in OT
By Ted M. Green | NBA, Kobe Bryant, Los Angeles Lakers
Well it is.
If you don’t count the cartoonish Vic the Brick, as those of you who read columns on this website know quite well, there are few greater admirers of Number 24 than yours truly. But here it is, Mr. MVP, straight up:
If you’re going to be lauded for being Most Valuable Player in the year you finally and unselfishly made your teammates better, you’re going to be lambasted for reverting to form, to going back to what may be your very true nature in your heart of hearts.
You’re going to be blasted for being Kobe Bryant, Most Vain Player.
Game 4 Sunday in Utah. Tied at 108 after 48 minutes. A great run in the last 3:50, led by Derek Fisher and Lamar Odom, erases a seemingly unerasable 12-point Jazz lead, setting up the Lakers for what could be a series deciding OT.
That’s when the clearly injured Bryant, grimacing in obvious pain, slowed to maybe half of himself, if that much, with some kind of tweaked muscle in his back, invoked the Kobe Rule. The rule familiar to all who have marveled and sometimes agonized over his peerless play and domineering personality.
The Kobe Rule being: 40% of me is still better than 100% of anyone I play with.
So instead of staying what was working, Kobe took 6 of the Lakers 9 shots in overtime… six of eight if you discount Sasha’s meaningless three-point brick at the end. Six of eight, even though it was obvious Kobe couldn’t get past Andrei Kirilenko, even when it was clear to an entire arena that he wasn’t anywhere close to his regular unguardable self.
Everything that was working so wonderfully in the final minutes of regulation, Kobe decoying, or dishing, facilitating and setting up Fish and L.O.in the overtime the MVP took that blueprint and vainly stuffed it in his monogrammed gym bag.
Never mind Phil Jackson screaming from the bench to run the offense.Hurt or not, compromised or not, Mamba was gonna be The Man and that’s all there was to it.
Why play the right way when he could do it the Kobe way?
What gall, what nerve, what chutzpah, to go into his I’m the Man act when it was his teammates who got HIM into the overtime!
Stubborn, willful, selfish to a fault? Or unselfish MVP?
Will the real Kobe Bryant, please stand up?
Or maybe that IS the real Kobe, brilliant and athletically bipolar at the same time.
During the OT, for the first time in 12 years of being wowed by Kobe, I was actually yelling at the other Lakers to freeze him out! I mean, was it not egregiously obvious to everyone who saw it that the Lakers were infinitely better when he wasn’t hogging the ball, going one-on-one almost every possession, as he insisted doing in overtime?
After the game, Jackson blamed everyone but Kobe, saying the other Lakers “bailed” on him, turned passive, dumped the ball in his lap, used him for a crutch like they have in the past. But remember: PJ needs Kobe to win a title. He’s the LAST Laker the coach is gonna rip right now. So he dumped it in everyone else’s lap, pardon the expression.
This, then, is the conundrum of Kobe. The unparalleled talent matched only by an ego just as outsized. Trouble is, you never know when the ego, the need to be the center of attention, the Most Vain Player, is going to rear its ugly head.
It reared on Sunday as Kobe attempted 33 shots. That is not how the Lakers won this year. It is not how they will win from this point forward.
The need to always take over, even when it’s clearly contra-indicated, is a self-defeating trait that only serves to remind his critics that he is still 0 for the NBA title since Shaquille O’Neal was sent packing.
Game 5 will come soon enough and when the teams get back to L.A., the refs aren’t too likely to send Utah to the line 45, or 450 times, or whatever it was.
Game 5 will give the MVP a chance to revert back to his 2008 self.
Assuming three days of treatment put Humpty Kobe back together again, Game 5 could and probably should put the Lakers back in control of this series.
No doubt 90% of Laker fans and Kobe worshippers familiar with our site will now enter the blogosphere and scream that I’m the one with the nerve for having the temerity to criticize the game’s greatest player.
But this is called writing, not cheerleading. You Kobe fans can gush if you must and put on those blinders . But deal with this: Nobody’s perfect, not even the MVP.
If I could sit in Monday’s film session, just him and me, I would simply ask him: Incredible as you are, just five days after being formally acknowledged for your team play, for subordinating and controlling that massive ego in all the right ways.
C’mon Mr. MVP, what the hell were you thinking?
Ted Green is Senior Sports Producer for KTLA Prime News and a former sportswriter for the L.A. Times and National Sports Daily.
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10 Responses to “The MVP (Most Vain Player) Sinks the Lakers in OT”
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i am a huge, huge kobe fan, and he has been the best player in the league for at least 6 years. this year he has transformed himself to making his team mates so much better, and he has been consistently doing that even in the playoffs. but today, man, today. i agree with the writer, what the hell were you doing kobe? the last few minutes of regulation were perfect for the lakers and they had the momentum, but then kobe ruined it in OT. although i’m pretty sure it was fated the lakers were going to lose (pau gasol missing a dunk? i mean come on) but this is just one game, and i’m sure it’s only a blip in his so far great performance in the playoffs. even when the lakers are playing badly, they’re still always close to taking the game away from utah. this just shows how much better la is than utah. i trust kobe will be back on track for game 5.
Ted,
I suggest you go back and watch the OT again without the emotions; you just might come away with a different view. Also, if your first instinct is to equate five minutes of overtime to a person’s true nature, the problem just might be you. What about the last five minutes of regulation? Or that does not count? In your estimation when he is passing it, he is faking it but the when he is shooting he must be doing what he really wants, right? Did you not hear Sloan say that the reason Fisher got open in the fourth quarter was because they over committed to the help and you think they did not make adjustments to that? You think they did not recognize that he was hurt and could not beat them one or one and therefore stayed home on the others? Or did you not notice the team come down every time and clear out the side time and again? Listen it is fair to blame the headman when it goes wrong but please, some perspective. If he was handicapped out there, he would be the last to know it, I have limped around in plenty of games because it is what you do, if the coach leaves you out there, then you play. A 30/10/08 night and all you get for it is belly aching because some people believe that Derek fisher and Lamar Odom would be wide open in Overtime, Monday Morning quarterbacking at it’s best.
According to ESPN, “Sasha Vujacic rebounded from his scoreless Game 3 to score 11 points on 4-for-6 shooting, but the rest of the reserves were so ineffective, Lakers coach Phil Jackson had to call them out after the game, when he also criticized Bryant’s teammates for becoming too dependent on their ailing star in crunch time.
“I was angry at his teammates for dropping the ball off in his lap,” Jackson said. “I thought guys just bailed out on him.”
“I know what he means by that,” Bryant said. “He wants them to come at me, but come to me later, not right away and just stand around.”"
The coach said it himself.
a laker lover- you are dead right; first time i can remember yelling at kobe to give up the rock and be a decoy; although let’s nto forget gasol blew a wide open dunk and then sasha threw the ball away from the baseline into the key where there was one laker and four jazz- i can see kobe’s view but he blew that game big time, amazing considering his line of 33,10,8
did you not know who was passing to those fisher 3s in regulation? did you not know who was attracting all those double and triple teams just to make oppurtunities for other guys? C’mon, were you guys even properly watching that game? kobe did what he had to do and has been doing all his career and that is to win the game. He didn’t hoist those shots just for the hell of it. HE WAS TRYING TO WIN THE GAME. if you’ve noticed, everybody was stationary when kobe had the ball almost each and every time down the stretch in regulation and overtime. if the players are not moving, what can kobe do, of course SHOOT the freaking ball. It just felt like nobody wanted the ball. Nobody made a cut or did the rotation. Like pau said, they lacked execution. Yeah, fisher and odom were the ones who VISIBLY helped make the comeback for the lakers. Kobe was JUST attracting guys and passing to fisher for some open 3s. Kobe JUST tried to bank one from an inbound pass against 2 or 3 defenders making it easier for lamar odom who became opena and unguarded to make a footback. Kope JUST tried to make a layup while getting a no call foul when he got hit in the body on his way up to the basket in overtime. Yeah, that’s JUST what he did. I do appreciate odom’s and fisher’s efforts for making it happen, but we’ve been asked this almost numerous times already, “who do you want the ball during the final moments in the game?” of course, without a doubt in everybody’s mind, you want it to be in the hands of the best closer in the game. The guy, The man, just wasn’t able to make it happen for the team. But come wednesday, he will show up and torch those jazz and those critics. KOBE Most Valuable Player!
I knew Kobe probably shot us out of that overtime. But, if you look closely at the OT session, you’ll see that he was WIDE OPEN. He never shot under pressure. He never forced a shot. He just couldn’t hit the side of a barn.
Sloan lies when he says they didn’t play Kobe different. They definitely sagged off of him (AK admitted as much), because they could see that: a) his jumper had left him, and b) he had no first step.
He’s a shooting guard. He’s supposed to shoot when open. No one else was open (by design). Sloan gambled and won, that’s all.
If Kobe hits just one of those shots, it opens the lanes back up and the Lakers probably win.
–Fearless
This series is far from over. But we saw what we all saw in game 1 of the Denver series and that’s “Kobe being Kobe”. I care not to hear the falderal about Kobe getting the Lakers to OT or the fantasy that his teammates “dumped” the loss in his lap in overtime.
This was Kobe being Kobe. Even after 3 or 4 bricks and blocks, the Lakers were only down a bucket and he who accused those of dumping, called a play where Kobe handled the ball out of a time out. Kobe didn’t set a screen, or run a cut, he dribbled and dribbled and dribbled and cranked up a shot looking for a whistle.
It is complete nonsense to blame anyone but Kobe for the horrendous overtime in game 4, well except for PJ who could have called plays for the sizzling Fish or LO or Sasha - but let’s all defend Mr. 1st Team All Defense and move on to Wednesday where we are primed for a quick 12 point deficit and the uphill struggle this series has become after two blown steals in Utah.