Kobe, Phil are on the same page

Kobe Bryant’s the one who brought it up, this combination of himself, Phil Jackson and books, and the tone was nothing like the toxic results you would find by typing those three subjects into Google’s search engine.

“Our relationship has blossomed,” Bryant said of Jackson. “The books that he gives me now, I read them.”

We know Jackson has given his players reading material for years, to mixed receptiveness. We also know he gave the world an inside account of the 2003-04 season that led to his dismissal and the breakup of the Lakers when he wrote “The Last Season.” Bryant wasn’t too fond of that one.

These days Jackson can give Bryant books on leadership and Bryant devours every word. Bryant can allude to “The Last Season” without scrunching his face. In the course of a game, Jackson can think of a play to see Bryant has already called it.

No team can succeed if the star player doesn’t buy into the coach’s philosophy, and right now it sounds as if Bryant has invested his entire contract in Jackson’s Zen blend.

“At the end of the day, I play to please him,” Bryant said.

Whatever level of success the Lakers find in the near future is because of this newfound bond between Bryant and Jackson, a pair who have gone from disconnected to intertwined in only a couple of years.

What happened since 2003-04? Quite simply, 2004-05. With Jackson and Shaquille O’Neal gone, the Lakers went 34-48 and Jackson’s replacement, Rudy Tomjanovich, didn’t even last half the season.

“I think [Bryant] missed [Jackson] once he was gone,” said Brian Shaw, the Lakers assistant coach who was Bryant’s teammate for four years. “He was like, ‘Oh, I thought it was bad. It wasn’t bad at all. This is bad.’ ”

So Jerry Buss brought Jackson back. The big question going into last season was, how would Jackson and Bryant coexist? It turned out to be a non-story -- which is a story in itself. It’s really a byproduct of Bryant’s maturation, an understanding that he can’t do everything himself.

Jackson gets some credit -- “Both of them have compromised, both of them understand one another now,” Shaw said -- but Bryant is the one who had to travel the greatest distance.

“He knew that I saw him as a scapegoat for a lot of things that were going on, that were done in this organization,” Jackson said.

But Bryant couldn’t focus on that exclusively and ignore the appreciation Jackson has for Bryant’s work ethic and will to win.

“Now he knows that I have tremendous respect for him,” Jackson said.

“It’s a beautiful relationship,” Bryant said. “It’s a relationship that I think is great because of what we went through, because of all the criticism or the book or whatever, we’re able to put it behind us and he understands that I truly believe that everything I’ve become as a basketball player and what I’ve learned is directly attributed to him and his coaching staff.”

While Bryant did submit to the team concept enough for the Lakers to win three consecutive championships at the start of the decade, he then appeared to want to try it on his own, like a singer leaving a successful band for a solo career. Now he’s back with the group, apparently convinced that maybe a system that has won nine championships isn’t so bad.

He’s so in tune with Jackson that after the Toronto game Friday, Jackson said: “There were three or four times tonight where we were looking at each other and calling the same thing, [him] asking me and I [said], ‘Yeah, that’s what I want.’ There’s a lot of cohesiveness there.”

Bryant’s willingness to place more trust in others might also stem from the lack of trust he has in his right knee after summertime surgery. He wore a brace on it in a game for the first time Friday. You can see the stiffness when he runs, and note the diminished elevation when he leaps.

When he’s on the bench in the second half, he wraps a heat pad around his knee and sometimes winces as he tries to straighten it, looking like an uncomfortable traveler stuck in a middle seat on a cross-country flight.

“That’s exactly the feeling,” Bryant said. “You get back in the game and I’m not sure if I can kick it up. It feels a little weird, then I try to kick it into another gear, all of a sudden you start feeling some pain.”

When Bryant had a similar operation on the same knee in 2003 he said he wasn’t back completely until after the All-Star break. “Look for the same thing from this type of surgery,” he said.

In the meantime we can look for the same type of game Bryant had Friday, when he passed out of double-teams instead of constantly trying to shoot over them, he fed the ball to his teammates (trying too hard, sometimes), and he had just enough athleticism to score 31 points, with a reverse layup here and a spin-move-hanging shot there.

He doesn’t make it look easy anymore. Sometimes it looks as if he has to fight his own body just to get through the game.

One thing he has learned: It’s a lot easier when he isn’t clashing with his coach.

*

J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read more by Adande, go to latimes.com/adandeblog.