Kobe Bryant Puts Finger On Shooting Woes

After three terrible shooting games, he said he is going back to using a splint.

Kobe Bryant is in a shooting slump. It was at the heart of two Lakers losses last week, and it continued in a win over the Milwaukee Bucks on Sunday night (his teammates picked up the slack this time).

Kobe made just  4 of 21 against Milwaukee. He was 10 of 30 against the Clippers. He was 14 of 37 against Portland: That is 31.8% over the last three games. And it’s not like he has stopped shooting -- that’s not how Kobe functions, he is too confident to stop trying.

It’s all about the finger he fractured last month.

“I tried to play with the splint off, but it’s going back on,” Kobe said after the Bucks game. “Just trying to get some flexibility back. The finger felt pretty good so we tried to go without the splint, but it isn’t strong enough.”

Kobe suffered an avulsion fracture in his index finger of his right hand on Dec. 11 against Minnesota. For those of you without medical degrees, that is when the tendon comes off from the bone and takes a little piece of the bone with it. It hurts about as much as it sounds like it would.

Since then, Kobe has favored his left hand — he even took an 18-footer with his left hand against Milwaukee that generated laughs from teammates — while trying to find ways to play with the sore shooting hand. That meant at first what Phil Jackson called a “prosthetic” – a splint designed to support the finger. Despite that, the finger was aggravated a couple times and the swelling came back, like after a recent game against Sacramento. Kobe has tried a hard splint, a soft splint and most recently no splint (just a little tape). Kobe said after the game Sunday that no splint gave him the best feel but his finger wasn’t strong enough and shots were just coming up short.

Those short shots — and the volume of them — is why the Lakers had lost two in a row before the Bucks came to town and had a whole team shooting like Kobe for a night. As is the team pattern, when other players are not shooting well Kobe tries to take the team on his back, except that with his finger injury he couldn’t carry them.

But as the Lakers head into their toughest couple weeks of the season — San Antonio and Dallas this week, Orlando and the Celtics in the coming weeks — the Lakers are going to need Kobe and his finger to find their stroke again. Or this modest two-game losing streak will not seem so bad.

Kurt Helin could not type with a broken finger as he runs the NBA/Lakers blog Forum Blue & Gold (which you can also follow in twitter).

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