Whenever Phil Jackson publicly recounts a private conversation he has had with one of his players, trust that he is up to something -- and it's not making a Chicago columnist's day or offering the public a delicious glimpse inside an NBA franchise. Phil believes his teams should keep it all within the family as much as Pat Riley does.

So why did the Zenmaster reveal a recent exchange he had with Kobe? Two reasons: 1) It's a last stab at hoping public pressure will do what his private harangues have not -- make Kobe do what Phil wants; 2) Should the Lakers fail to repeat, it's an attempt to put the blame a safe distance from one Phil Jackson.

The pressure ploy has worked almost without fail in the past, including last year with this very same player, but it'll be a miracle if it works again. Kobe took the browbeatings before his teammates last year because he believed it unified the Lakers in a way nothing else had before. He figured it was one of Phil's Zenmaster devices and he went along with it.

But as advanced for his age as Kobe is, being put in that role a second year in a row is proving to be too much. He may play like a machine at times, he may appear to be oblivious to not having a single teammate he can trust, but he's still 21.

In any case, the Chicago columnist's contention that Kobe "can't read the game" is preposterous. The problem is that he understands both the floor game as well as the political one that Phil is playing, and no longer wants to be a pawn in it. Kobe looks at all the times he saved the Lakers' bacon during the playoffs, looks at how he designed his summer to be ready to defend the Lakers' title (while Shaq did not), looks at the personnel moves that have made the Lakers a weaker team than last year, and figures he deserves better than to have to carry the psychological load of whipping boy again. There's a point when being repeatedly ripped wears on anybody and I believe Kobe has reached it.

Maybe Phil is right, maybe Kobe is another Houdini, creating difficult situations just to see if he can get out of them. But know this -- Phil's disclosure about Kobe has a sleight-of-hand purpose, too. For any magician to slip through an escape hatch, he first has to make his audience look elsewhere.

Ric Bucher is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at ric.bucher@espnmag.com.