KTLA CONFIDENTIAL

Lakers MVP (Most Vain Player) Sinks Them in OT

By Ted Green
Senior Sports Producer, KTLA Prime News

May 12, 2008, 4:44 PM PDT

Kobe, you're so vain, I bet you think this song is about you.

Well it is.

If you don't count the cartoonish Vic the Brick, as those of you who read columns on this website know quite well, there are few greater admirers of Number 24 than yours truly. Heck, I wrote a column here over two months ago extolling Kobe for MVP, and that was when everyone was on the Lebron/KG/Chris Paul bandwagons.

That said, here it is, Mr. MVP, straight up:

If you're going to be lauded for being Most Valuable Player in the year you finally and unselfishly made your teammates better, you're going to be lambasted for reverting to form, for going back to what may be your very true nature in your heart of hearts.

You're going to be blasted for being Kobe Bryant, Most Vain Player.

Game 4 Sunday in Utah. Tied at 108 after 48 minutes. A great run in the last 3:50, led by Derek Fisher and Lamar Odom, erases a seemingly unerasable 12-point Jazz lead, setting up the Lakers for what could be a series deciding OT.

That's when the clearly injured Bryant, grimacing in obvious pain, slowed to maybe half of himself, if that much, with some kind of tweaked muscle in his back, invoked the Kobe Rule. The rule familiar to all who have marveled and sometimes agonized over his peerless play and domineering personality.

The Kobe Rule being: 40% of me is still better than 100% of anyone I play with.

So instead of staying what was working, Kobe took 7 of the Lakers 10 shots in overtime...7 of 9 if you discount Sasha's meaningless 3-point brick at the end. Seven of nine, even though it was obvious Kobe couldn't get past Andrei Kirilenko, even when it was clear to an entire arena that he wasn't anywhere close to his regular unguardable self.

Everything that was working so wonderfully in the final minutes of regulation, Kobe decoying, or dishing, facilitating and setting up Fish and L.O…in the overtime the MVP took that blueprint and vainly stuffed it in his monogrammed gym bag.

Never mind Phil Jackson screaming from the bench to run the offense…Hurt or not, compromised or not, Mamba was gonna be The Man and that's all there was to it.

Why play the right way when he could do it the Kobe way?

What gall, what nerve, what chutzpah, to go into his I'm the Man act when it was his teammates who got HIM into the overtime!

Stubborn, willful, selfish to a fault? Or unselfish MVP?

Will the real Kobe Bryant, please stand up?

Or maybe that IS the real Kobe, brilliant and athletically bipolar at the same time.

During the OT, for the first time in 12 years of being wowed by Kobe, I was actually yelling at the other Lakers to freeze him out! I mean, was it not egregiously obvious to everyone who saw it that the Lakers were infinitely better when he wasn't hogging the ball, going one-on-one almost every possession, as he insisted doing in overtime?

After the game, Jackson blamed everyone but Kobe, saying the other Lakers "bailed" on him, turned passive, dumped the ball in his lap, used him for a crutch like they have in the past. But remember: PJ needs Kobe to win a title. He's the LAST Laker the coach is gonna rip right now. So he dumped it in everyone else's lap, pardon the expression.

This, then, is the conundrum of Kobe. The unparalleled talent matched only by an ego just as outsized. Trouble is, you never know when the ego, the need to be the center of attention, the Most Vain Player, is going to rear its ugly head.

It reared on Sunday as Kobe attempted 33 shots. That is not how the Lakers won this year. It is not how they will win from this point forward.

The need to take over, even when it's clearly contra-indicated, is a self-defeating trait that only serves to remind his critics that he is still 0 for the NBA title since Shaquille O'Neal was sent packing.

Game 5 will come soon enough and when the teams get back to L.A., the refs aren't too likely to send Utah to the line 45, or 450 times, or whatever it was. I predict Carlos Boozer and/or Mehmet Okur, will have 2 fouls before the 10-minute mark and one will have at least 3 by halftime. The game is in L.A.

Game 5 will give the MVP a chance to revert back once again to his 2008 self. After all, Kobe is The Transformer.

Assuming 3 days of treatment put Humpty Kobe back together again, Game 5 could and probably should put the Lakers back in control of this series.

No doubt 90% of Laker fans and Kobe worshippers familiar with our site will now enter the blogosphere and scream that I'm the one with the nerve for having the temerity to criticize the game's greatest player.

But this is called writing, not cheerleading. You Kobe fans can gush if you must and put on those blinders . But deal with this: Nobody's perfect, not even the MVP.

If I could sit in the Game 4 film session, just him and me, I would simply ask him: Incredible as you are, just 5 days after being formally acknowledged for your team play, for subordinating and controlling that massive ego in all the right ways…c'mon Mr. MVP, what the hell were you thinking?

Ted Green is Senior Sports Producer for KTLA Prime News and a former sportswriter for the L.A. Times and National Sports Daily.