The Los Angeles Lakers' Jekyll and Hyde act continued apace over the weekend, with a Friday night blitzing (17 3-pointers, 54 percent shooting, a 28-and-20 performance by Dwight Howard and 122 points) of the Denver Nuggets giving way to a Sunday night stumble against an Orlando Magic team that entered Staples Center at 5-10, losers of three straight and five of its last seven. But in the two teams' first meeting following the four-team, 12-player offseason blockbuster that sent Howard from central Florida to Hollywood, the Magic hung with a Laker side that's experienced its share of turmoil this season, too, and pulled away with a 35-19 burst over the game's final seven minutes.

The loss drops the Lakers to 8-9, a below-.500 mark that seems stunning given both the collection of talent on hand and the statistical note that L.A.'s got a top-five offense and a top-10 defense in terms of points scored and allowed per 100 possessions, according to NBA.com's stat tool. The win-loss-win-loss trading, the alternating progress and regression on display every night, has been somewhat understandable — after all, the team has had three different head coaches in the space of a month and has been without injured star point guard Steve Nash, expected to be the triggerman first for Mike Brown's new-look Princeton offense and now for the spread pick-and-roll system he ran under Mike D'Antoni for years in Phoenix, for all but 50 minutes this season. Still, explanations aside, this is hardly the way most figured the Lakers would look one-fifth of the way through the 2012-13 season.

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As the losses mount — the Lakers would have to go 65-0 to fulfill Metta World Peace's preseason wish, which seems unlikely — patience is wearing thin, not only within the Lakers' fan base (which, as we've seen, can be pretty intense) but also within the ultra-competitive mind of L.A.'s top dog. From Joe McDonnell of FoxSports.com:

Kobe Bryant had seen enough. Another humiliating loss to another bad team Sunday night had the Lakers co-captain ready to take on the whole team if his teammates don't start getting their games — and attitudes — together. "I'll kick everybody's ass in this locker room if it doesn't happen," Bryant said after a 113-103 loss to the Orlando Magic at Staples Center. Yes, the 6-10 Orlando Magic. "It's the attitude you have to have. Metta is the same way. Dwight has it in him as well. Even though he smiles a lot, he cares a lot about this. Come hell or high water, this has to get done."

This seems to be the general consensus around the Lakers — all hands on deck, we're surrounded, wins need to be strung together like popcorn for a Christmas tree and whatever must transpire for those wins to start coming needs to happen, like, yesterday.

Lakers fans surely appreciate hearing those words from Bryant, but would probably much rather hear them from charity-averse center Howard (9 for 21 from the free-throw line against Orlando, including 7 for 14 during L.A.'s fourth-quarter collapse, a career-worst 46.5 percent on the season) or, even better, from out-of-sorts big man Pau Gasol (11 points on 4-for-11 shooting against the Magic, sadly stuffed at the rim by earthbound-and-down Orlando counterpart Glen Davis, playing the least productive basketball of his NBA life) than from a version of Kobe who's playing perhaps the most efficient ball of his career while serving as the Lakers' primary scorer and facilitator in Nash's absence.

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In his postgame comments, Bryant discussed the 32-year-old Spaniard's need to restructure his offensive game to better fit into both the twin-towers lineups in which he finds himself with Howard and the uptempo spread screen-and-roll system D'Antoni favors. And when I say "discussed," I mean "spit some venom." More from McDonnell:

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