Lakers’ Byron Scott argued Kobe Bryant can sustain current workload

“My job was to make you absolutely miserable,” Kobe Bryant said. “I came out there to destroy you. When players lined up with me, they knew it was going to be a long night emotionally and physically.” (Photo by Hannah Foslien/Getty Images)

“My job was to make you absolutely miserable,” Kobe Bryant said. “I came out there to destroy you. When players lined up with me, they knew it was going to be a long night emotionally and physically.” (Photo by Hannah Foslien/Getty Images)

MINNEAPOLIS — The man’s value once depended on how many NBA championships he won, how many game-winners he sank and and how many opponents he demoralized. But with Kobe Bryant laboring through his 20th and final NBA season, Lakers coach Byron Scott said he is evaluating his star player a different way.

“We’re all hoping that at the end of the day that by game 82, he’s still on the floor,” Scott said. “He’s still playing and he’s finishing out the way he wants to, which is on the court.”

The Lakers (3-18) enter Wednesday’s game against the Minnesota Timberwolves (8-12) at Target Center with Bryant averaging 16.2 points while averaging 30.6 percent from the field and 21.9 percent from 3-point range. But that’s not damning enough. Bryant still leads the team with a league-leading 17.8 field-goal attempts per game. And the Lakers’ most recent game, a 103-92 loss to Toronto on Monday marked the first time all season that Bryant has shot 50 percent from the field.

Despite Bryant nursing three season-ending injuries in consecutive seasons, Scott insisted that Bryant can complete the 2015-16 season without experiencing any major injuries while keeping the same workload.

“He can as long as I keep those minutes down,” Scott said. “I don’t want to get to 37 or 38 [minutes per game] anymore. I want to keep it down to low 30’s.”

Bryant has averaged 31.3 minutes per game this season, but he has played at least 35 minutes in four regular-season games thus far. Bryant even logged that on last week’s back-to-back last week in Philadelphia and Washington. Bryant also played in the Lakers’ back-to-back slate this week in Detroit and Toronto despite nursing a stomach illness.

But Scott argued that Bryant has compensated elsewhere by resting during all morning shootarounds and minimizing practice times. Scott added that Bryant still “gets a bench of shots up” because he’s “trying to keep his timing.”

Scott has occasionally called for Bryant to reduce his shooting, most notably from 3-point range. But Scott has mostly deferred to Bryant on that issue. Hence, Scott downplayed whether he wants Bryant to duplicate the 16 shot attempts he had in Toronto after having high-volume performances in Portland (7-of-20), vs. Indiana (4-of-20), at Philadelphia (7-of-26), vs Washington (10-of-24) and at Atlanta (4-of-19). Bryant took only 15 attempts against Detroit because he sat out the entire fourth quarter.

“He’s going to have games like that where he plays well and games like that where he doesn’t have it,” Scott said, matter of factly.


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