Kobe's belief in teammates helping Lakers flourish

	Kobe Bryant (left) is deferring more this season to teammates like forward Luke Walton, who is enjoying a career year. Lisa Blumenfeld/Getty Images

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For such a seemingly precious commodity, trust comes pretty cheap in most walks of life. At a traffic stop, a person trusts the driver behind will stop before plowing into his trunk. At a restaurant, a diner trusts the food is prepared in a kitchen not overrun by mice. At home, one trusts the contractors who built the structure did well enough that the roof doesn't fall in during a snowstorm.

But in a relationship, no matter the context, "you just don't give your trust, you have to take [it]," observed Lakers forward Lamar Odom.

Now in his third season with L.A.'s glamour team, Odom and his Lakers teammates seem to have finally done just that in winning over the only relationship that counts in L.A. these days -- that with Kobe Bryant.

"I think my teammates know that I trust in them to perform well and I'm trying to get their best performance out of them," Bryant recently told the Riverside Press Enterprise. "I think it heightens their confidence, and I continue to go to them and I continue to look for them on a nightly basis."

The numbers have added up to the best Lakers season since Shaquille O'Neal was in purple and gold. Taking seven fewer shots a game than last season, Bryant had guided owner Jerry Buss' club to a 30-19 record through Wednesday.

Not many would have thought such a shift in Bryant's approach was possible after he petulantly took only three second-half shots as his team was getting blitzed in a Game 7 loss to the Suns in the first round of the Western Conference playoffs last season. But to hear coach Phil Jackson tell it, Kobe's transformation is as much a change of spirit as it is of play.

"There's that old term about a heart-to-heart meeting with Jesus, and Kobe kind of had that," Jackson told SI.com and a group of reports recently in New York. "He realized, I think, at one point in his life that he couldn't force his way through this world. There are certain things and ways that you have to go about doing things that are meted out through karmic action. He takes the right path now. A lot of it is support of his teammates, a lot of it is doing the right thing at the right time."

It helps, of course, to have teammates worth supporting, and in Andrew Bynum's blossoming as a center and Luke Walton's emergence as a reliable third scoring option and dirty-work specialist, Bryant has some additional options to defer to beyond Odom.

Only 19, Bynum, with some seemingly useful tutoring from Lakers legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, is averaging 8.5 points, 6.6 boards and 1.7 blocks -- modest numbers, but a world apart from the token stats he produced as a rookie year in only 7.3 minutes a game. More important, Bynum's development has solidified a position filled the previous two seasons by the oft-injured Chris Mihm or the oft-inconsistent Kwame Brown.

Seven years Bynum's senior, Walton's development also has been instrumental in the Lakers' transition from one-man show to fully functioning team. The four-year veteran is producing 11.7 points, 4.9 rebounds and 4.2 assists a game while making the passes and taking the positions essential to running the famed triangle offense.

All of those numbers pale in comparison to the 3-1 mark L.A. has etched with Bryant out of the lineup, including a 2-0 start to the season (as Bryant concluded his rehab from offseason knee surgery) that proved to many that this Lakers team may not have been as helpless without Kobe as many -- or he -- thought.

"We really had an interesting year because Kobe couldn't practice for most of training camp and missed the first game or two," Jackson said. "As a consequence, [the team] had to learn to build their game without him on the floor. [In] the process, Kobe fit in very well with them. He kept the ball moving, he kept working within the offense, kept encouraging them and it's just worked out for us, fortunately."