Beast or Burden: Death from Above

Ah, that was better. We got a game that turned into a brutal slugfest, which only worked to the advantage of the established team, the one that has braved fights far more intense than this one, and wasn't going to be fazed by an up and coming Clippers team, even one headed by a competitive maven like Chris Paul. The Lakers got into the Clippers' heads and turned their energy against them, brilliantly done by Metta World Peace, who did his best Scottie Pippen impression -- sans the efficient scoring -- on the court and played one of his best games of the year. Under this veneer of Lakers toughness, however, was a simple and undeniable fact: they shot better. Those painfully wide open shots? Downed. Those opportunities that will make or break the team come April? In the net. We can talk about offense balance, Kobe taking up too many possessions, other players being passive, and so forth, but the bottom line is that people have to make shots to space the floor, and for once this season, the Lakers obliged. With that in mind, let's move forward into this week's risers and fallers.

Beast

• Andrew Goudelock -- Small surprise then that the best shooter of the bunch gets this spot, no? Goudelock finally put together the game we expected out of a player who more than deserved the moniker "Jimmer-lite" for his play at the College of Charleston, and whose range was so ridiculously long Kobe Bryant would be envious. Before this, Goudelock had been tentative, never a great sign for a rookie, and seemingly unwilling to embrace that simple role the team drafted him for: put the round ball in the net and get his team three points. He is simply too good a shooter -- and we mean too good a shooter, look at this clip -- to be doing something like that. And while his role certainly isn't that of the go-to guy at Charleston, it at least served him to be looking for his shot, and that was what he did against the Clippers. He was decisive off the dribble, showing a nice floater that could be a nice part of his game if defenders chase him off the line, and he showed an excellent complement to Kobe Bryant and the other starters due to the inevitable attention they demanded on the floor. Quite simply, if he keeps this up, he will definitely get minutes, and life will only get easier for Kobe Bryant, Andrew Bynum, and Pau Gasol if suddenly lanes are open to them due to a sweet-shooting guard on the perimeter.

• Pau Gasol -- The presence of a shooter might not have mattered for Pau against the Clippers though, as he clearly was a man on a mission. Having challenged the team dynamic to place him on the perimeter, he claimed that he was a force to be reckoned with in the post, the absence of that part of his game for a good year notwithstanding, and unlike the talk of most players, he backed that up with some vintage Pau play throughout the game. He attacked the rim aggressively, still got a few jumpers, and showed a couple beautiful fakes in the post that are part of the Pau we all know and love. Just as there is no question that the offense works much better when Pau is distributing from the high post, so it is when he demands so much attention from the defense due to his multifaceted scoring ability. We still have to work out the Gasol-Bynum relationship so that both benefit each other in their scoring attempts and gain enough synergy to work off each other, but that can wait until the team has more than one (!) real practice under their belt. There is still a long way to go before the playoffs start, and more than enough time to make Pau and Drew more than the sum of their parts.
• Metta World Peace -- Fire. Enthusiasm. Energy. MWP brought all of those things against the Clippers and it was refreshing to see after he appeared so lifeless in previous games this season. Save for the start of the season, where he seemed to embrace his role of leader of the bench unit, MWP was tentative, disengaged from the action of the offense, and hardly playing with the spark that has defined his defensive play in recent years. In this case, he so outplayed Matt Barnes that he relegated him to a mere ten minutes while MWP stood at the spearhead of the Lakers' effort against the Clippers' attempts to intimidate. He directed the offense, got in the face of any Clipper who dared to mess with any of his teammates, and provided an infectious energy on defense that stymied a normally very efficient Clippers offense. If he can distribute the ball as well as he did against the Clippers, he'll earn his rotation minutes, and perhaps dissuade the Lakers against consigning his contract to the amnesty clause in the off-season.
• Honorable mention to Andrew Bynum, who stayed fairly consistent despite his frontcourt partner finally taking a bigger chunk of the offensive pie, and he made the two biggest plays of the game in his layup off a Kobe pass and his sick block of DeAndre Jordan to close the game. He still needs to provide more energy even when he doesn't get the ball and those rebounding numbers could use some work, but the increased rest should aid him. Against a Milwaukee team without Andrew Bogut and a Minnesota team with Darko Milicic and Nikola Pekovic, he should produce this weekend.

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