[Chron] It's a dirty job, but someone has to defend Kobe

It's a dirty job, but someone has to defend Kobe
With Kobe Bryant fresh off a historic scoring run, Shane Battier takes a realistic approach to tonight's defensive duty

By JONATHAN FEIGEN
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

LOS ANGELES — The palm trees outside will sway in the perfect Southern California spring breezes. Sunset and tipoff will arrive together, as if timed intentionally.

This, however, is not paradise.

This is Elba. It's Alcatraz. It's Shane Battier's fate, his exile.

"I'll be on Kobe Island," Battier said. "Sometimes it gets lonely out there."

Battier will be punished for his defensive excellence with the assignment of defending Kobe Bryant, the NBA's leading scorer and recent author of four consecutive games of at least 50 points, when the Rockets play the Los Angeles Lakers tonight. Bryant averaged 56.3 points in that four-game run, the longest for any player since Wilt Chamberlain in 1962.

The streak ended with a 43-point outing in the Lakers' victory over Golden State on Sunday. Bryant followed that with 23 points against Memphis on Tuesday. Bryant, the Rockets expect, will be gearing up to start rolling again.

"If anything, that bodes worse for me," Battier said. "I'd much rather he was coming off a game he scored 80 points. After a tough game — he's a competitor — he always comes back tough and better the next time. I was not happy with that last game."

So Battier, who has spent the season assigned to every Bryant, Dwyane Wade and Carmelo Anthony in the Rockets' path, will be asked to defend Bryant with an understanding about the reality of stopping him.

"You can't, you can't," Tracy McGrady said. "I'm saying you can't when he has it rolling like that. When the boy has it rolling like that, there's nothing you can do. Trust me. I know.

"One player is not going to shut a guy like him down. He's too good. He's one of the best offensive players in NBA history."

• • •

There will be times, Battier said, that he will do everything right, and it won't work. The Rockets, however, do plan to try anyway.
"Try to limit transition points, second shots and free throws," Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy said of his defensive checklist for Bryant. "Can you stay disciplined to those three things and realize sometimes he scores against good defense?"

The dos and don'ts of defending Bryant likely will be more complicated than that.

• Stay down. Bryant has one of the league's best pump fakes. If he gets a defender up, or even off balance, it's over.

• Maintain body position. If he catches a defender shading one way or another, Bryant is such a versatile scorer, he will attack the other way.

• Shut the back door. As tempting as it is to try to deny him the ball, in the triangle offense, the Lakers burn overplaying defenses by sending him on back cuts to the rim.

• Early does it. Bryant loves to launch transition 3s.

• Get back. The Rockets excel with help defense, but in transition, they have to be get back as a team and clog the seams.

• Don't cheat. If the Rockets go too far on the top side of post defense, Bryant spins out for alley-oop lobs.

• Gang up. The Rockets won't abandon everyone else to surround Bryant, but they must have effective help defense to make life difficult.

Then, if every one of those things and many others are done perfectly, the Rockets will have to accept if none of it works.

"You think you're playing good defense and the guy is still making shots," McGrady said. "And you're like, 'Damn, I thought I was playing good defense,' and they go to something else and start gambling, and that's when they really get in trouble."

Having gone against so many great scorers so often, Battier excels at remaining disciplined. Even if he cannot stop Bryant, Battier won't let frustration beat him, too.

"All you can do is make him work," Battier said. "Don't overreact to his makes. He's going to make. There's little (that) people are doing to slow him down. All I can do is try to keep him off the foul line and try to get a hand up in his face.

"It's really old-fashioned basketball. Just try to stay between him and the basket and try to make him take tough shots."

• • •

McGrady knows about being on scoring rolls. But he said that topping 50 in four consecutive games is too far beyond anything he has done for him to venture even a guess about how it feels.
"I don't know, I really don't know," McGrady said. "That is another level."

McGrady doesn't know if he could average 56 points over four games, but he could go back to being one of the league's top scorers. Still, he did it long enough to be even more impressed with Bryant's run.

"I could do that, of course, absolutely," said McGrady, who won NBA scoring titles in 2002-03 and 2003-04. "It's a matter of just being aggressive, being in attack mode. I think once you get in that mode and you get in the zone, you don't know how long it will last. But for that game, that team is at your mercy. And it kind of carries over until fatigue kicks in.

"It's good as an individual to accomplish something like that, but if you have to do that for an entire season, you're not going anywhere. Looking at the Grizzlies game the other night, it looked like it kicked in a little bit. But he had a hell of a stretch. I don't care how great you are, it's going to run out eventually. But he put on a historic streak right there."

With two days to rest, Bryant should be physically ready to roll again. So the Rockets will do what they always do and dispatch Battier to that island with him.

"He's the toughest because he's a thirsty offensive player," Battier said. "There's a lot of really good offensive players in this league, but they become satisfied if they have 30 points. Kobe wants to score every time he touches the ball no matter what the time or the score is. That's what makes him the best."

ROCKETS NOTES

Rebounding the key

With the Rockets' playoff spot assured, coach Jeff Van Gundy would like to strive for improvement in many areas because he believes in "balance." But with the Rockets, rebounding seems to have become the most reliable barometer of how they play.
In the past 10 games, the Rockets are 6-0 when outrebounding opponents and 2-2 when they don't.

"You have to be good in all three phases of the game — offense, defense and rebounding — to win," Van Gundy said. "The offense and defense have fluctuated up and down. When we rebound, we win because rebounding speaks to tenacity and intensity and the willingness to do the dirty work"


Not counting shots

After making just 16 of 44 shots in his previous two games, center Yao Ming made eight of 14 against the Clippers, including seven of his last 10.
Coach Jeff Van Gundy said he is not concerned with the number of shots Yao takes.

"I don't put a number on him," Van Gundy said. "If it's a good shot, it's a good shot, no matter who it is."

In good hands

With the Rockets leading by one Wednesday and the ball in the hands of their most reliable free throw shooter, Yao Ming, Yao gave up the ball to guard Rafer Alston. Yao has made 86.1 percent of his free throws, Alston 71.4 percent. But Alston made both attempts with 4.1 seconds left in the 92-87 win over the Clippers.
"We'd like our best free throw shooter going to the line, but I feel confident making free throws late in games," Alston said. "Throughout my career, I've been able to come through."

When Yao grabbed the game's last rebound, he kept the ball until he was fouled, making both attempts with .08 seconds left.

• Lakers update: They won all four games during Kobe Bryant 's streak of scoring at least 50 points per game and have moved past the Denver Nuggets and back into sixth place in the Western Conference. Bryant had 53 in a double-overtime win over the Rockets in Staples Center in December. Center Kwame Brown is questionable with a sprained left ankle.

• Rockets update: They have won 10 of 13 games since Yao Ming 's return and six of their past seven. They have won just one of their past five games against the Lakers, winning 102-77 in Houston on Jan. 10.

• Check out: The scoring of Yao Ming, who has averaged 30.5 points in his two games against the Lakers this season.

• Statistically speaking: Kobe Bryant has led the Lakers in scoring in 25 of the past 26 games.

jonathan.feigen@chron.com

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