No Kobe. No problem. The Lakers went 4-1 playing fantastic basketball without him. But you know what? It wasn’t this fun.
Kobe returned from his 18-day absence to push L.A. to a 99-98 victory against the stunned Memphis Grizzlies. The difference was Mamba’s go-ahead 3-p0inter with 4.3 seconds to go. Along the way, he added a total of 32 points, 7 boards, 6 assists and 3 steals. And by the way, the Lakers played their worst game in two weeks.
L.A. turned the ball over 17 times, played some shoddy defense, and generally were out hustled by Memphis. And I don’t care. Because the Lakers aren’t going to win a title without Kobe. With him, they’ll be games where they stand around and watch 24, sequence after sequence. The ball won’t move, the offense will struggle, and they’ll let teams hang around that they should blow out. But most of those games will be Laker victories, if for no other reason, in the last 2 minutes of a basketball game, the Mamba rules.
L.A. Balls 