THE LAKERS ON “TAKING SHAPE”

Adaptability is an unsung virtue is it not? The Lakers exhibited a willingness to deviate from the script on Tuesday night and ad lib with Kobe “Bean” Bryant setting the table for other players and posting a mere 13 points on 4-9 shooting. He had 7 assists and the Laker Bigs (Gasol and Bynum) were able to impose their will. It was fun to watch the most valuable player of the last five years, unofficially, value alternative thinking over ego.

Even the engineers who design earthquake resistant bridges pride themselves on flexibility in the structure. You can’t fight an earthquake, so there is a bridge under construction in the Bay Area of California that gives some six feet in the event of “The Big One”. It moves with the quake I am told and the give and take is clearly what sets it apart from its rigid ancestors. But enough pseudo-science talk. If there is a character trait to be heralded, even coveted it is adaptability.

Games, especially the playoff variety, are not played on paper and have little to do with vital statistics like height and weight. Years of experience mean nothing either unless those thousands of minutes played by Laker veterans can materialize as corporate efforts to stop Russell Westbrook’s lightening quick slashes. Adaptability starts with an admission that perhaps the prowess I once had I no longer possess. Alternative thinking is the proverbial other way to “skin a cat” (strictly an idiom BTW). Knowing how to adapt is a posture more than it is a skill. It is a mindset of being married not to one formula but rather to the divine insights and ingenuity required to create innumerable formula for today’s problems.