SAN ANTONIO VS. LOS ANGELES PHILADELPHIA VS. MILWAUKEE

Wednesday, May 30 Laker recipe: Two egos, one title By Mark Kreidler Special to ESPN.com Not to get overly hysterical about it, but what if Shaq was right, and all the Lakers really needed was for everyone (read: Kobe) to understand that the triangle offense that carried them to an NBA championship last season went through the center position? Kobe has made his peace with Shaq -- at least for the playoffs. And not to get overly analytical about it, but what if Kobe was right, and all the Lakers really needed was to get their steadying influence back on the court and healthy -- not Shaq, but Derek Fisher? And not to get overly Zen about it, but what if Phil Jackson was right, and all the Lakers really needed was for their two best players to stop the ginsu-knives-at-20-paces act and strap on enough basic professionalism to get the job done? And what if I'm right, and Hollywood really is big enough to fit more than one name on the marquee? You watch Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant together now, and it is almost impossible to conceive that either man could have let things deteriorate to the point that they did during the Lakers' positively ho-hum regular season. You watch them together now and you see players working more or less harmoniously out there, seeming to know when is the time to pound the ball to the Big Chamberlain inside and when is the time to let Kobe do it from off the wing. You see Kobe feed the ball to Shaq and you hear Shaq compliment Kobe afterward. You see Shaq dominate a game and then step aside for Kobe to take over the next one. You find yourself asking: If it was this easy, why did it take almost a full season -- coming out of an NBA championship, no less -- for the parties involved to re-learn the old lessons? Answer: It couldn't matter less. Shaq and Kobe are back, and you'd have to say the timing is about right. You won't get far around here trying to proffer the nonsense that O'Neal and Bryant have ironed out their differences -- or, depending upon your willingness to eat tripe, O'Neal's assertion that there weren't any real differences to begin with. In a word, nope. The problems were there; they were real enough for Jackson to become involved, at first distantly and then quite directly. Moreover, it's hard to imagine even today that either player goes to bed at night convinced of any fact more thoroughly than the fact that he, himself, is the reason Why. But that's no longer the whole story. If the first part of the story was Shaq basically insisting that an offense run through him was the ticket back to the promised land, then the second part is Shaq basically insisting that it's the 1-2 punch that really kills other teams -- a strong, clear recognition that, absent the threat of Bryant outside, O'Neal becomes the biggest target in America not wearing antlers. If the first part of the story was Bryant's obvious yearning to be The Man, then surely the second part is Bryant making some sort of peace with the fact that, in a championship run, all are Men. (Lesson for you future NBA Hall of Famers: If what you desire from your career is to have your own team in the worst way, chances are that's exactly what you'll get -- the worst way, indeed.) What, Los Angeles can't accommodate two superegos as part of a winning formula? They go through more than that during breakfast at the Beverly Wilshire. And if the first part of the story was, say, that saggy-bottomed middle of the season, with O'Neal carping about the offense and Bryant pointedly saying the Lakers needed Fisher, not O'Neal, to get healthy again, and all that -- if that was the first part of the story, then the second part had to have been the Sacramento series that concluded last week. This was perhaps the perfect exploitation of the tremendous combined talent here. In the first two games against the Kings, O'Neal was the immovable object inside, scalding Vlade Divac and Scot Pollard for a combined 87 points and two wins. In the next two games, as the Kings and the officials tightened up on O'Neal, Bryant was the irresistible force outside, wasting fine Sacramento defender Doug Christie for a combined 84 points -- and two wins. And the magical element here is that never, over the course of the four games, did either player truly subjugate the other. In Shaq's biggest game, 44 points and 21 rebounds, Kobe Bryant quietly scored 29. In Bryant's biggest game, 48 points and 16 boards, Shaquille O'Neal went 25 and 10 despite fouling out. Sacramento, of course, is no San Antonio, and the Spurs have their own special brand of poison (Duncan, Robinson et al) to bring to the feast. Even a few weeks ago, you'd have been tempted to look at the cohesive, mutually respectful Spurs and see the team that the Lakers should have become this season. Whoops: L.A became that team while nobody was looking. Shaq and Kobe keep playing nice like this, and who knows where it leads? They might make a movie about it down there. There's room on the marquee. Mark Kreidler of the Sacramento Bee is a regular contributor to ESPN.com Send this story to a friend | Most sent stories

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