Lakers’ Pau Gasol keeps his priorities on winning teamwork

WASHINGTON — When they introduce the Wizards’ starting lineup here, they turn up the volume and call this "the most powerful city in the world!"

(It’s not the most powerful team in the world, so you do what you can to stoke the crowd.)

The Lakers created some great new Washington memories with their visit to the White House on Monday — and Kobe Bryant’s additional 20-minute private meeting with his family and President Barack Obama in the Oval Office on Tuesday morning. Bryant especially enjoyed how much his daughters got to chat with the president and said they batted around the idea of some pickup ball this summer on the White House basketball court.

"That’d be great," Bryant said.

But everywhere you go in life, there is context. There’s compare and contrast to what happened before, and the Lakers have some interesting history here in Washington.

Most notably, as Phil Jackson mentioned Tuesday night after an impressive victory over the Wizards, the Lakers first met Pau Gasol here two years ago.

"We really didn’t know what to expect," Jackson said.

The Lakers were here on a trip when Gasol joined the team after the Feb. 1 trade with Memphis. He arrived into Washington late at night and met with a group of reporters in a suite at the Lakers’ team hotel.

Some first impressions of Gasol that first night in the hotel suite still hold: He was clearly nice in the considerate, polite way that few look-at-me NBA players understand. Gasol, who is from Spain, comes across as a regular guy who is eager to please, and even in his second language of English, his intelligence comes across just as much.

Bryant referred to him the other night as "so intelligent" — and then followed up with "very intelligent" and "highly intelligent." Jackson mentions that the key thing is that Gasol was "a very willing student" upon joining the team.

But what was most memorable about talking to Gasol that first night was his earnestness about just how sick he was of being a loser in Memphis.

"You get into a mindset that is not really positive," Gasol said that night. "You kind of sink."

And right after that session, Gasol went to have a much more important sit-down with Bryant — when that particular topic of needing to win was further emphasized. It has turned out that Gasol’s drive to win has been greater than could be understood two years ago.

"Pau is underrated," Lamar Odom said Tuesday, "for his aggressiveness and his will to win — his ability to do anything to make the team better."

Let’s go back further to another day in Washington.

Four years ago, the Lakers blew a 16-point lead and lost by three points to the Wizards. It was Bryant’s second season with Odom, the supposed second star. Odom lined up on the wrong side of the court for the final play — costing the Lakers and Bryant a shot at a tying 3-pointer.

Bryant was enraged. He berated Odom the entire time they walked off the court, all the way to the locker room — and later Odom rushed out of there.

Bryant had sprained his right thumb that night and still scored 31 points. Odom, though, missed a tying 3-point shot with 41 seconds left off Bryant’s pass and then undermined that last play, which wound up in a Bryant turnover.

Bryant’s fury so rattled Odom that night that Odom denied there was even an argument, nervously repeating as he rushed from the locker room: "I didn’t hear anything."

Moved into a bench role by Jackson last season, Odom has never measured up to all that Bryant wanted for him and from him. Yet it has worked out just fine — because of Gasol, whose 26 points Tuesday night mirrored Bryant’s 26, with Odom contributing, too.

"A-plus," Odom said when asked about Gasol. "Plus-plus-plus."

Odom is satisfied with Gasol having gotten the Lakers to be defending champions.

Bryant still is not.

"I just think he can get better," Bryant said of Gasol, whom Bryant gave a brief talking-to Tuesday night in the fourth quarter upon sensing a late-game letdown. "I get on him a lot because he’s a great player already, but I don’t want him to be comfortable just being a great player.

"I want to see him take another step."

After that on-court talking-to from Bryant, Gasol definitively nodded.

Unlike Odom, Gasol does want more . . . so both he and Bryant might just get it.