The Los Angeles Lakers were surprising a national television audience Friday night when they were hanging with the Los Angeles Clippers. In the past, this would have sounded like an impossible scenario, but in today's NBA, the Clippers are ascending toward the top of the mountain and the Lakers are trying to find their way out of the cellar of the league. With the score tied at 103 and less than five minutes remaining, Jeremy Lin waved off Kobe Bryant down the stretch and called his own number.
Instead of giving the ball to Kobe, Lin instructed him to set a screen. He dribbled around that screen with Chris Paul draped all over him and shot a prayer 3-pointer at the basket was the shot clock was expiriing. He knocked it down cold to put his team up three. While the Lakers ended up losing the game, Kobe loved his point guard showing that kind of assertive nature. He had a colorful way of describing moments like that too. From ESPN Los Angeles:
"You have to be able to assert yourself, especially on a team that I'm playing on -- especially on a team I'm playing on," Bryant said with some added emphasis. "Because I don't want chumps, I don't want pushovers, and if you're a chump and a pushover, I will run over you.
"It's important for him to have that toughness and to say, 'I believe in myself. I can step up, I can make these plays, I can perform.' I think that is very, very important."
Bryant, who scored 21 on 6-of-15 shooting from the field, has had players wave him off before. All the time, in fact.
"The teams that I've played on, the teams that won, we used to do that all the time," he said.
But Lin? Bryant said he hadn't seen that from Lin before. Bryant said he wasn't even sure if Lin's former teammates had told him to do that sort of thing before.
"It's like," Bryant said during his postgame news conference, then leaned forward and pounded his fist on the table, "you've got to put your mark down, man."
"At some point, you've got to piss on the fire hydrant."
I'm not sure if Lin was necessarily marking his territory in that moment, but he certainly felt like he could get off a good chance at scoring the basketball. Lin hitting the shot certainly helped the feeling of the moment, but Bryant has always wanted players he can trust to make big shots when the opportunity is there. While Lin's track record is relatively short, he has been called on in some big moments and had solid success at converting.
Lin finished with 17 points and nine assists in the seven-point loss to the other team from LA. Bryant finished with 21 points and seven assists. While the Lakers are 0-3 to start the season, this loss had a much different feel to it than getting destroyed by the Rockets and Suns in the first two games.
