The Goat Pen

Bklyn wrote: I expect him to have in the mid teens and about 7 or 8 assists.

Kobe Bryant would give his approval for the signing of Gilbert Arenas, according to two people familiar with the situation.

Bryant reportedly reached out to Arenas recently to let him know he’s on board with Arenas joining the Lakers.

Arenas is coming off the worst shooting season of his career, hitting 36.6 percent of his field goals and 29.7 percent of his threes for the Magic during the 2010-11 season.
Via Ken Berger/CBSSports.com

Kobe Bryant’s last shot of the day was spinning through the air when Ed Stefanski, Toronto’s vice-president of basketball operations, said out loud that it was going in. On press row, one reporter just breathed, “That’s good,” as the ball travelled along the baseline in a pleasing, perfect arc.

Bryant had missed six of his previous seven shots, nine of his previous 15, 14 of his last 22. He airballed an open three in the first half. If you dug deeper, Bryant was four for his previous 25 on so-called clutch shots — last five minutes, score within five points either way.

In the moment, none of it mattered. He had spotted open space on the right baseline, so he ripped himself away from two Raptors to catch the inbounds pass, took a dribble in rhythm, elevated — after an experimental knee treatment in Germany last summer he has more lift than he did last season, to be sure — and faded away from 20 feet or so. (The game book said 17; it was wrong.) It splashed down, of course, and the Los Angeles Lakers led by one with 4.8 seconds left. After some wrangling it would stand as the winning basket.

“That’s who he is,” said Los Angeles Lakers coach Mike Brown.

Two plays before, Bryant had lined up young DeMar DeRozan, the California kid who grew up idolizing him, created some space with a jab step, and canned a three-pointer that cut Toronto’s lead from four points to one. On the next play, Bryant stripped Linas Kleiza and took off; a little unexpectedly he dropped the pass to a trailing Metta World Peace for the layup. When asked if the offensively struggling World Peace was calling for the ball, Bryant laughed. “Of course he wasn’t,” he said.

“I think it’s good,” said Bryant, long after his 27 points in a 94-92 win that pushed the Lakers to 16-12 on the season. “It gives him a good boost. It shows him in those situations that I have confidence in him.”

That’s the Kobe that Phil Jackson worked on for so long, trying to find the balance between self and team, but it is not the Kobe that has been in evidence this season. He leads the NBA in scoring at 29.3 points per game; his usage rate, which estimates what percentage of plays he uses by passing or shooting when on the floor, is just below 38%. It is just barely below his career high set in 2005-06, which was the highest such mark of all time.

Bryant has entered that kind of historical conversation through sheer relentlessness of performance. He has played a combined 49,386 NBA minutes, regular season and playoffs, more than any other active player save Jason Kidd. Bryant is 33, in his 16th season, grinding through a compressed schedule that made Kevin Garnett, his manically competitive colleague who has played about 600 fewer combined minutes, look like he was calcifying here on Friday night. Bryant has knee trouble, ankle trouble, finger trouble, wrist trouble, all in the last two years.

But it is not over yet. Kobe takes a savage, single-minded pride in that.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said. “I’ve noticed a lot of people going down to injuries, and I’m proud to say they’re a lot younger than I am. And here I am. No pulled hamstrings, no pulled muscles or anything like that. Over the summer I worked extremely hard, man.”

“He takes care of his body,” said World Peace, formerly known as Ron Artest. “Most guys that were in his position, they came and they went. He stayed.

“I’m not surprised because it’s him.”

Through that sociopathic focus, he is accumulating a body of work that has transcended all his youthful ambition, all the missteps — the 2003 Colorado rape charge excepted, which is still a go-to for the occasional heckler — and at the very least, he will not leave voluntarily.

“‘I’ve seen him adjust his game sometimes, but Kobe don’t take no nights off,” said World Peace. “He passes the ball sometimes, he might switch it up a little bit, but for the most part … I’ve seen potentially more natural scorers. But Kobe got fundamentals. You know? He understands the fundamentals, the little things, the footwork. It’s like writing a story and using the same words over and over again, that’s not gonna fly. You’ve got to change it up.”

Bryant does, and it remains a basketball joy, his game. The footwork so precise it could be a dance chart, the way he uses his body to create space — on one post-up he bounced the 245-pound James Johnson backwards with a shoulder to the chest — but the singular will that created him will be weakness, sometime soon. When asked if there was a spot on the floor he didn’t like shooting from, Bryant grinned and said, “Nooo. I’ll launch it from anywhere.” When asked if his role on the 2012 U.S. Olympic team would be any different than in 2008, he shook his head.

“On that team? Nah, I’m the closer, man,” Bryant said. “They just bring me in in the last two minutes or something like that. If they need me. That’s what I do. LeBron, D-Wade, Durant, all those guys, they can do the heavy lifting.”

But he is still doing the heavy lifting, and sometimes it’s too much. The other night in Philadelphia, when Kobe passed his old friend Shaquille O’Neal to become the fifth-leading scorer in NBA history, he missed 10 of 11 shots in a second-half stretch before hitting a seven-footer with a minute or so to go, and then missed again. The Lakers lost that one. This one, they won. People make it sound like Kobe is automatic at the end of games, but he isn’t. He never was. He just wasn’t afraid to take the shot, again and again. His hero-ball ways have lost as many games as they’ve won, but he remains unafraid.

And as he ages, and moves further away from the basket, it’s all harder. On this afternoon, it worked. On another night, it won’t. Kobe Bryant is holding off time, throwing his shoulder into its chest, creating space with footwork, elevating even as gravity pulls him down. Kobe Bryant’s last shot is coming, but it’s not here yet.