Kobe Bryant now has to guide this team to the post-season, but he will have to do it with an aging Steve Nash and an injured Dwight Howard. Pau Gasol will be out of the lineup for the long-term and the other star players will have to fill the void.
---- See Dwight Howard through the years in photos! ----
Bryant sees that Howard will be the key to the team’s success and the five-time champion wants his starting center to play with more urgency moving forward. Kobe spoke to ESPN and discussed Howard and how he would like the big man to approach the game.
“(Howard) has never been in a position where someone is driving him as hard as I am, as hard as this organization is,” Bryant told MacMullan. “It’s win a championship or everything is a complete failure. That’s just how (the Lakers) do it. And that’s foreign to him.
“When you think about it, there aren’t many organizations that look at it that way. There are only two that can really honestly say that’s what they live by — Los Angeles and Boston.”
The Lakers are a franchise that is used to winning championships and they will accept nothing less than another title. There are 16 championship banners hanging from Staples Center and Bryant wants his teammates to do whatever it takes to raise another one from the rafters.
At this point, it is unclear whether or not Howard will play in the Lakers’ game Thursday night when they travel to Boston to face their longtime rival.