Are Lakers losing Kobe Bryant's waiting game?

FROM SALT LAKE CITY — Sasha Vujacic grabbed. Adam Morrison screamed.

Vujacic grabbed harder, playing defense with handfuls of jersey. Morrison screamed louder, warning Vujacic to keep his hands to himself.

Vujacic shrugged. Morrison surged. The team converged. The men were separated.

During this final scrimmage of a Friday afternoon practice at EnergySolutions Arena, some Lakers were wincing.

Sitting on the baseline, Kobe Bryant was smiling.

"I wasn't even going to move," he said later. "A lot of meowing going on out there. The claws coming out. A good thing."

One day after using up one of their nine lives in an awful Game 3 defeat to the outmanned Utah Jazz here, the Lakers were a mostly ornery bunch, working late and sweating buckets, Phil Jackson even ordering Derek Fisher to stop shooting and get on the bus.

Sitting on that baseline, Kobe Bryant kept smiling.

"These are the playoffs, you don't win every game," he said. "You lose sometimes. It happens."

More than their star, more than their leader, Bryant is the Lakers' face. During Friday's practice, despite the curses being tossed from three-point line to paint, that face was one of patience and restraint.

Drives me crazy. Suits him fine.

Bryant agreed that for probably the first time in his career, he has gone three postseason games without putting his stamp on any of them.

But, no, he's not ready to change anything yet.

"I'm going to stick to the script," he said. "I'm going to get the guys involved early, work it inside, get them going . . . and if that doesn't work, then go to me."

But, c'mon, it took nine minutes for him to score in Game 1, it required eight minutes for him to score in Game 2, and it was nearly halftime before he scored in Game 3.

The first two games, the Lakers survived. The third game, they imploded, with Bryant's fingerprints all over the wreckage. When he finally started looking for the basket, he couldn't find it, and the Lakers were lost.

Shouldn't he start doing a little more, a little earlier?

"Yeah, I will probably have to look for my shot a little earlier, maybe I've been waiting too long," he said, pausing. "But, still, I know what my job is."

He says his job is not to score 50 points in a losing playoff game as he did against Phoenix a couple of years ago.

His job is to lead this team to a championship.