[Apologies for the messed up order that brings Matt Barnes to the table so late. I tried to dictate this piece to my assistant while on my private plane headed to Dubai for the annual bloggers Celebrity Golf Tournament and peasant hunt...er, I mean pheasant, but the connection was bad. Hers, of course.]

Matt Barnes has a reputation in this league. He's the type of guy you love when he's on your team, and hate when he's not. You love him on your team because every second he's on the court, he's going a million miles an hour (in a mostly controlled way, mind you), pursuing the basketball, making hustle plays and doing everything he can to give his team an edge. You hate him as an opponent because that doing everything part includes shit-talking, antagonizing, and just kind of generally being a jerk. That's Matt Barnes, and unless I've gotten the wrong cut of his jib, I think that's exactly who he wants to be.

Well, I can't speak for what other team's fans think of Matt Barnes' Lakers tenure, but on the home team side of things, Barnes was thiiis close to being exactly as advertised. After Shannon Brown's psychedelic shooting disappeared (complete with painful withdrawals from coming down off that high), Matt Barnes became the only thing to get excited about when the Lakers bench unit entered the game en masse (Lamar Odom not included). Barnes brought the hustle that is his trademark, his energy on the boards gave the Lakers much needed second opportunities (which become important when, you know, the unit you are a part of can't score worth a damn), and most importantly, his aggressive, energetic defense was contagious. The Lakers bench had many, many failings this year, and just about the only time they were successful, it was because they caused turnovers which led to easy baskets, and causing turnovers is something Barnes does so well, he inspires others to get in on the fun.

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Phil Jackson's career has always been a paradox.  He has become the greatest, most successful coach in the history of professional basketball by doing the exact opposite of what we would expect a good coach to do.  Good coaches manage a game ... Phil Jackson lets the game do all the managing.  Good coaches make sure the right people are on the court at all times ... Phil Jackson experiments with rotations for no reason in the regular season, and then leaves the same rotation to fail time and time again in the playoffs.  Good coaches are active and engaged, yelling out adjustments on the fly to help his team win ... Phil Jackson, well, he whistles really, really loud.

None of this is groundbreaking analysis.  People have been trying, and failing, to understand the mysteries of Phil Jackson's success for well over a decade now.  It is because he is so different, his style so unique, that so many people still believe he has achieved all that he has by simply being in the right place at the right time.  Nobody knows exactly how Phil was able to do what he did in order to win so much, and nobody is stupid enough to try and duplicate his style, in part because nobody is sure that it's a good style to duplicate.

Again, nothing you haven't heard before.  Phil Jackson is amazing , and nobody really knows why.  He is the ultimate coaching paradox ... so what happens when the paradox resolves itself?  What happens when the conflicting logics that ultimately lead to contradiction instead lead to a conclusion that is reasonably expected?  What happens when everything that Phil Jackson does, and doesn't do, all of those differences between Phil and the other good coaches, ends up being the reason (or at least one of the reasons) why his team lost?

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On May 11, three days after the Dallas Mavericks got done wiping the Lakers off the map, Kobe Bryant characterized the team's failed three-peat bid as "a wasted year" of his life. With those words he pithily codified the binary worldview that pretty much everyone in Lakerdom holds these days. This team, with more than its share of stars but slipping down the wrong side of the aging curve, exists to win championships now. All outcomes that fall short of that goal amount to waste of a precious resource, that resource being the time left in Kobe's career. Tick-tock, Clarice.

But whatever went wrong for the Lakers this past season, little of it can be laid at Kobe's feet. By any objective standard, his performance was outstanding. And for a 32-year-old perimeter slasher, a role reliant on the fast-twitch musculature that begins to desert most people in their late twenties, his performance was extraordinary. In certain respects, his form was even better than it was in the 2009-10 season, which ended with his second straight Finals MVP award. That the 2010-11 campaign concluded more bitterly for the team shouldn't stop us from appreciating another splendid season from the franchise warrior-god.

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In a season that had quite a few themes for the Los Angeles Lakers, we finally arrive to pass judgment on the player central to the most important one.  The Lakers are Kobe Bryant's team, and they will most likely remain so until he hangs up his low-tops for good, but it is a title borne out of legacy and will power, and no longer because Kobe is the central piston in the Laker engine.  That piston, at least last season, was Pau Gasol. 

Just in case you aren't a car person, or are still too traumatized by the fact that Pixar finally made a bad movie to think in these terms, let me put it more clearly: Pau Gasol was the most important player on the Lakers roster last year.  This isn't about shots or touches.  The offense ran through Kobe first, just like it always does.  The defense belonged to Andrew Bynum and Lamar Odom and Ron Artest.  Gasol's place in the team hierarchy, in all facets of the game, was unchanged from prior seasons.  What changed was how important his role became.  What changed is how reliant the team became on what Pau Gasol brings to the table.  And in the end, what changed was the team's inability to deal with the fact that Gasol couldn't cook every night.

Pau Gasol was central to the team's performance, and the team failed miserably.  It doesn't take an advanced level of cognition to come to the conclusion then that Pau deserves a lion's share of the blame for the season's flameout.  For that reason, many of you were particularly looking forward to the review of Pau's season, I suspect out of some love of bloodsport, but you will most likely be disappointed if you were anticipating a bloodbath.  After all, Pau Gasol had many labels over the course of this season; MVP Candidate, Possible Narcoleptic, Resurgent Force, Tired Ninny, Insecure 2nd Banana, and Tin Man (Wizard of Oz burrrrrn).  But the final, and most apt, label given to the big Spaniard, the one that has stuck with him all offseason, is Scapegoat.

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After the passing of another season, Andrew Bynum remains the most polarizing figure in all of Lakerdom, not only for his actions on and off the court, but for the unique place he holds in the team's future. Only 23 years old after six seasons in the league, Bynum is the exception among a group of veterans gradually moving towards the wrong side of 30, and one of the few pieces that could conceivably be considered a future building block as the team transitions from the Kobe era. The fruit of the Lakers' only trip to the lottery since the 1994 draft, when the Lakers took Eddie Jones, Bynum has changed dramatically from the skinny 17 year old who still remains the youngest player ever to play in an NBA game.

Even counting from there, however, it is fairly safe to say that last season was a revelation in terms of Bynum's evolution as a player, and that figures significantly into the team's future mindset as the Lakers seek to return to championship form after the playoff debacle against the Mavericks. After the jump, we will look at how Bynum's absence at the start of the year affected the team, his play before and after the All-Star break, and how he appears to fit into the new system Mike Brown is implementing as well as the team's future.

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In many ways, Ron Artest's inconsistent season mirrored the Lakers'. Both he and the team seemed to have lost a step, couldn't shoot, played great defense at times and couldn't quite figure out the Triangle. Each enjoyed their finest stints of the season immediately after the All-Star break, and then finished the season in disgrace against the eventual champion Mavericks.

For the Lakers, we can convince ourselves it was mental or physical fatigue after three straight trips to the Finals. It's certainly acceptable for them to have been worn out, whether or not that was actually the case. For Ron, he should have been better. Considering he's an X-factor, the Lakers were pretty tough to beat when he was good. He should have been more comfortable in his role throughout the season. Instead, he was worse, and we didn't have the chance to overlook these problems as there was no chance at a Finals redemption this time around.

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The next player up in our player report card series is Derek Fisher. Fisher’s season was everything we have come to know from the tough veteran. He provided solid three-point shooting, low turnovers, and tough physical defense on bigger guards. Unfortunately he also provided extremely poor shooting on anything that wasn’t an open three and matador defense against smaller and quicker guards, all things we have come to expect. It was really a year very much like the last, and therein lays the problem. The Lakers have been looking for the heir-apparent to Derek for more than a few seasons now and yet are no closer now than three years ago.

Derek Fisher led the team in three point shooting (minimum 10 attempts) by hitting just under 39.6% from behind the arc. He bounced back from the 35% he hit last year and produced a percentage right in line with what he did the first two seasons back with the Lakers. Unfortunately that was the only place on the floor he could make a shot.

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Lamar Odom has always been somewhat of an enigma. His talent has never been denied.  He's been garnered with once-in-a-generation kind of player types of accolades since he was a teen in Queens playing AAU ball with Metta World Peace. Unfortunately, he has never met the expectations of critics and fans to be the player we thought he could be.

Inconsistent. 

Always the first word that would pop up in anybody's mind when thinking of Lamar Odom. For eleven seasons, there've been flashes of brilliance, followed by disappearing acts. He can be so good when he's on that for eleven years, no one wanted to admit that maybe Lamar just was who he was. The uber-talented inconsistent enigma. And just when we all thought it was safe to realize who Lamar really was, he gives us his finest season ever by being consistent. He played with an aggressiveness and assertiveness that we'd never seen before, night in and night out. He seemed happy with life, with his role on the team, and it translated to the floor. Inconsistent became reliable.

Just like that, the "shoulda coulda woulda's" and "potential" conversations started back up. We wondered if he would keep it up. What took so long? Would it last? After all, he was a star in his own reality show and married to a Kardashian of all people, who only live life depending on ratings and tabloid run. How could that be good for him? It was. Good enough to win the NBA's Sixth Man Award, his stellar play lasted all season.

Sort of. 

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