It is wrong to judge a book when the book is only half written. It's unfair to measure a man's performance when outside events are responsible for his failures. It's foolish to throw away a history of strong work on the basis of one short period of failure. All of these statements can be used to explain why it's not a good idea to condemn Mitch Kupchak for failing to put together a roster that meets the high standards of the illustrious Los Angeles Lakers franchise. None of these statements can prevent us from doing so anyways.

The Los Angeles Lakers are not a very good team. They will (probably) make the playoffs. They may win a playoff series. Anything else would have to be considered a surprise. For a team that has one of the best cores in the league in Kobe Bryant, Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum, that's not good enough, which is a perfect description of everything surrounding those three guys. Not good enough. In fact, not even close to good enough. Outside the Big Three, the Lakers probably have the worst 4-15 roster in the league. And sadly, despite all those mitigating statements explained above, the blame for it has to be at the feet of one Mitch Kupchak.

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How many of you remember taking the SAT tests in high school? If you do then you most likely remember the analogy questions. These were the questions I most often feared. My brain has always been wired to understand the math and sciences with relative ease, while the verbal questions were always quite difficult for me. The key to answering the analogy questions correctly was to understand the relationship between the first two words, so that one could select a fourth word which would hold a similar relationship with the third word. With that in mind I present to you an analogy:

The Lakers are to the Clippers as Pau Gasol is to ____?

A) White Swan

B) Blake Griffin

C) Spain

D) Marc Gasol

E) Llama

Usually three of the five answers could be eliminated relatively easily. These three answers held some relationship to the 3rd word (Gasol), but that relationship did not transfer to the first two words (Lakers and Clippers). For example, Pau has been known to be called a "white swan", but the Lakers haven’t been called the Clippers, so answer A can be eliminated. The same logic can quickly eliminate answers C (the Lakers are not from the Clippers like Pau is from Spain) and E (the Lakers don’t resemble the Clippers like Gasol does a Llama. That leaves two remaining answers, Blake Griffin and Marc Gasol.

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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.

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In many ways, Pau Gasol is out of place as an NBA player. He's been blessed with the pre-requisite gifts of length, agility, and athleticism in varying degrees, but his mentality is different than 90% of the players who don an NBA uniform. The normal NBA player is aggressive by nature. Pau Gasol is not. The normal NBA player is typically masculine, with huge biceps and tree trunks for legs that allow the player to absorb contact and fly through the air. Pau Gasol is wispy by comparison.

The normal NBA player does much of what he does by instinct. Pau Gasol does not. Pau Gasol is a thinker, not a doer. That's not to say he doesn't do anything. Doers think and thinkers do. It's a matter of priority, and Pau Gasol's first priority is always to have his actions well thought out. This is why so many of Pau Gasol's opportunities with the basketball wind up the same. He'll catch the ball, turn and face his defender, and wait. He's thinking, analyzing the court, trying to determine which of the vast array of moves in his arsenal would be most appropriate for the situation. Many times, the most appropriate outcome is to move the ball elsewhere, and Pau Gasol is true to his analytical nature every single time.

There is another byproduct of Pau Gasol's thinking mentality, one that occasionally makes him a hard man to root for. Because he plays the game with his mind, and not with his instincts, Pau Gasol often plays without much emotion. In many ways, he's like a basketball computer. You can see other players play with tremendous effort in certain situations, but Gasol's effort never waxes, never wanes. When he gets beaten defensively, he doesn't show disappointment. When his teammates ignore him, he doesn't make a fuss. He's simply there, doing his job, all the time, never adjusting his effort or his usage, even if the Lakers might need him to.

You might spend a great deal of time watching Pau Gasol and think he lacks the fire that drives the greatest of players. You would be wrong. Pau Gasol has the fire. It doesn't burn hot like we see with Kobe Bryant, doesn't rise and fall like we see with Andrew Bynum, but it's there, eternally hidden below the veneer of his thinking man's persona.

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Losing against Miami on the road? Alright. The next day in Orlando on a back-to-back? Explainable. At home after a day of rest and starting off with a 27-14 first quarter lead against the Pacers? Yikes. The loss was disturbing not only for the continued lack of offensive flow outside of certain stretches, but the rather alarming lack of defensive intensity, given that it is supposed to be a hallmark of a Mike Brown-led team. The Pacers shot 55.6% from behind the arc with nary a defender near them in most cases, and to compound these problems, Roy Hibbert outplayed Andrew Bynum in the paint and scored on nice hook after hook on the block. Fatigue, obviously, is a culprit in some of these problems -- the team finally had its first full contact practice since training camp today, a testament to how unforgiving the schedule has been for the Lakers thus far -- and we still have a long while for the ship to be turned around, but the Lakers have certainly been digging quite a hole for themselves. For that reason, picking positive contributors was remarkably difficult this time around -- in an atmosphere growing more and more ripe with disappointment, even modest improvement looks appealing.

Beast

• Metta World Peace -- He finally broke out of his funk, shooting better than 50% for the first time in nearly a month against the team whose championship aspirations he brutally crushed in 2004. How did he do it? He finally decided that his painfully futile attempt to shoot jumpers from the perimeter wasn't working and went back down into the post to bully smaller players, just as he did to start the season. It still boggles the mind that a career 34.2% three-point shooter could decline so dramatically from behind the arc, and one would think that he would improve at some juncture, but at least for this game, MWP embraced his limitations and worked to his strengths, his one attempt and make from behind the line notwithstanding. The more punishing the Laker attack is against the interior is, the better, and he adds a well-needed post presence to an otherwise painfully moribund bench unit. Like Derek Fisher, this could be his one good game for the next few weeks, but at least for today, we extend our kudos to MWP.

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So, that optimism vanished fairly quickly, no? In a stretch against four serious playoff teams, the Lakers' inadequacies on offense were exposed in possibly the most painful way imaginable. Blame tired legs, the lockout, or similar -- and by all means, on some level, you have to blame no legs for a shooting performance as putrid as the ones that have been put up recently -- but the Lakers failed to step up to the plate, and unsurprisingly, we again have a bit of a crisis of confidence in Laker Land. The glass half-full approach is that the Lakers' losses on the road are nothing to fret about. Save for Portland and Miami, all of the Lakers' away games were on a back-to-back, and I doubt anyone favored us against the aforementioned two teams regardless. Still, you would expect a contending team to pull out a win or two, or at least be competitive in these kinds of games, and the Lakers simply aren't there right now. It certainly does not mean that the Lakers cannot reach that lofty plateau, as judging this the be-all, end-all final product of how the Lakers will look in April is remarkably premature, but they certainly have their work cut out for them. In any case, let's review a few of the recent contributors, and those who were less than so.

Beast

• Kobe Bryant -- As Chris noted, lost in the painfully bad offensive show that was last night's Orlando game is that Kobe arguably had one of his most effective games of the year. If there has been any criticism to put against Kobe in years past, it is that there appeared to be a fairly binary split between his "distributing" and "scoring" modes. He would switch from being remarkably passive to full-on Mamba mode without the two being well-integrated. Against Orlando, however, he was masterful. Using the pick-and-roll to create space for himself, he forced the defense to react to him, and in so doing, either created a wealth of open looks for himself or his teammates. That it resulted in a giant pile of bricks for everyone else should not detract from how critically important it is that Kobe continues such a performance. If this team is to compete in the long-term, it needs all the players on the floor to be producing, and Kobe creating for them in such a manner is one way to do so. He even had a number of nice cuts to the basket in which he received sweet feeds from Gasol at the high post, showing he could be effective off the ball as well. In many ways, this performance was more astounding than his spree of 40 point games -- it was a beautiful synthesis of all aspects of Kobe's game, and sans another creator on the floor, it goes without saying that he needs to continue to do so.

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On the slight chance you haven’t noticed, the Lakers are currently dead last in three point shooting this year. They have made only 69 of their 268 attempts, a rate of 25.7%. The fact that last night’s poor 6 for 20 from behind the arc counts as a good shooting night for the purple and gold speaks volumes about just how abysmal this has become. The Lakers haven’t always been a poor three-point shooting. Just a few seasons ago, when Pau Gasol was acquired, the Lakers finished 6th in the league in three point shooting percentage. However subsequent seasons saw the Lakers long range assault sputter to the point that it derailed their quest for a three-peat last season. This season was supposed to be different though. The Lakers used virtually every acquisition to bring in guys who can stretch the floor. So why is it not paying off? Let’s take a look at how the Lakers went from 6th to 30th in a span of 5 seasons and then what it means going forward.

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Kobe Bryant is as complex a player as exists in the NBA. The man, well, he has layers. There's the layer of ability, which Kobe has more of than just about anybody, despite having already lost enough of what he had to be considered declining. There's the layer of determination, which gives him as much or more drive than anybody who has ever played the game. There's a layer of hubris, which sometimes allows him to think keeping the ball in his hands is in the best interests of his team, even if it means dribbling into double teams and launching insanely difficult shots. The entitlement layer, the vulgar layer, the experience layer, the oblivious to pain layer, the work ethic layer, the frustration with teammates layer, all these layers may no longer add up to the best player in the league, but Kobe Bryant remains the most compelling figure to don an NBA uniform in the present day.

Compelling, like when he scores 40+ in 4 straight games when the basketball world is writing his (and his team's) eulogy. Compelling, like when he scuttled his own team's chances to win a game in Denver earlier this season, shooting 6-28 on a variety of terrible shots, leading one scribe to call it "the most selfish game you will ever see anybody play in the NBA". Compelling, like when he blows a chance to close out a game against one of the best teams in the league because of his need to have the ball in his hands during the final moments. Compelling, like when that same need has been (at least partially) justified by a large number of game winning shots he's hit over the years. People talk about Kobe all the time. They talk about the 40 streak. They talk about the Denver game. They talk about when he wins his team games by playing the right way. They talk about how he loses his team games by playing the wrong way. They talk about everything.

Well, almost everything. Last night's game against the Orlando Magic, and Kobe Bryant's performance in it, is the type of game no one ever talks about.

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