Bryant Is One for All Four

The Laker superstars are back on the floor, and it appears no one is as inspired by the talent surge as Kobe Bryant, who carried them all to victory Saturday night against the Chicago Bulls.

Whether his teammates wished to be carried would be left to them, and perhaps dissected in the locker room, or on the bus, or the airplane.

But Michael Jordan was up there somewhere, in a luxury box across from the Laker bench, and Bryant scored 35 points, 23 in the second half, to drag the Lakers past the Bulls, 88-81, at United Center.

“I made some pretty big shots for us,” Bryant said, aglow in, among other things, 12 consecutive points he scored down the stretch. “They were all falling.”

Bryant appeared to make progress on his sprained right shoulder, making 12 of 25 field-goal attempts, two of six with his left hand.

Meanwhile, Shaquille O’Neal, Karl Malone and Gary Payton combined to outscore Bryant by a point, and O’Neal took 15 rebounds, then left without talking to reporters for the fourth consecutive game.

Playing in the second of back-to-back games, and for the second time in going on three months, Malone played 38 minutes, some of them because Horace Grant was hurt again and some because Slava Medvedenko had five fouls in 15 minutes.

Malone missed an early breakaway dunk but took 13 rebounds and had seven assists and two steals. He said his knee was coming gradually, and that he was beginning to resume his obligations of leadership, and that he was just trying to help. He was two for nine from the floor, three of the shots in the second half, and had 10 points.

Payton, quiet again inside Phil Jackson’s system and Bryant’s forceful game, scored 10 points, four in the second half.

“We did what we needed to do to win a ballgame,” Malone said. “I’ll take this any day. I could really care less about taking shots, because in the game of basketball there are so many other things that you can do to help your team win. When all of us get on the same page, and believe what the coaches are telling us, we’re going to be fine.”

In the meantime, he said, “It’s not about how many points you score, it’s how many rebounds, assists and floor burns you get. That’s what’s important to me.”

Because of more inexact shooting (39% from the field) and 19 turnovers and a fractured attack, the Lakers led only 74-72, and the 18-win Bulls began to believe they had a third consecutive home win against the Lakers in them. But Bryant made a couple of layups, a 20-footer over Kendall Gill, another layup, a 20-footer behind an O’Neal screen and two free throws, and the Lakers led, 86-81, inside 20 seconds.

So the Lakers managed two wins on the four-game trip. After seven weeks in which they played 21 of 28 games on the road and made three separate trips to the East Coast, they returned to play 13 of their final 16 games at Staples Center.

It is where, apparently, they hope to retake the game that made them 18-3 in December, where the ball moved and the defense hounded and the players all smiled at each other.

Not a full 24 hours after going to the last buzzer against the Minnesota Timberwolves, the Lakers rode Bryant’s energy early. Then he scored 11 points in the third quarter, 12 in the fourth. After sitting out nearly all of three games because of the recurrence of his shoulder injury, Bryant returned to make five of his first 27 attempts. Since then, he is 17 for 34.

“We had to work at it all night,” Jackson said. “Shaq had shots underneath that missed. Karl couldn’t get his shot to fall. And Gary was never a factor.”

Which left ...

“I got here early and got some jump shots up and got used to shooting with the arm,” Bryant said. “I put some arch on the ball and was able to get a little more comfortable tonight.”

Then the shots began to fall, and the Bulls began to fall away, and Bryant, still wearing a pad on his right shoulder, forgot the injury, and carried the day.

“It’s fun being out there,” he said. “I think about how much fun it is to play the game. I don’t want to think about the pain. It’s fun being out there, especially in the fourth quarter.”