IF ONE COMMON denominator has persisted throughout Bryant's tenure with the Lakers, it is this: The blame lands elsewhere, and usually with teammates. O'Neal -- at times a mentor to Bryant, at other times freestyle-rapping to a packed club in Manhattan, "Yo, Kobe, tell me how my ass taste" -- is one in a long line of Bryant's teammates who've struggled to stick to a single script in describing the singular man. Bynum, Gasol and Howard have each been at turns coy, reticent, warm or biting. And, in turn, each has taken massive doses of blame in the media without Bryant meaningfully coming to their rescue.

"I've had a lot of clients who didn't want to play with Kobe." - Prominent NBA agent

"I've had a lot of clients in the last five years, good players, who didn't want to play with Kobe," says an agent who has had numerous NBA stars. "They see that his teammates become the chronic public whipping boys. Anyone who could possibly challenge Kobe for the spotlight ends up becoming a pincushion for the media. Even Shaq."

Sometimes the words come straight from Bryant's mouth, like when Bryant told Jim Gray in 2003 that O'Neal -- a perennial MVP candidate and repeat champion -- was "fat and out of shape" and intimated that Shaq threatened to play defense only when the offense suited him. More often, Bryant sidekicks have been assailed by stories attributed to "sources" on the team. Bryant-as-truth-teller is how it's typically framed, but few around the NBA see it that way. More common is the assessment that he undermines anyone who threatens his supremacy. One Lakers insider remembers a time in 2012 when Bynum -- about a year after declaring that the Lakers had on-court "trust issues" -- was due for a contract extension: "Andrew's question in contract talks was: 'How are you going to rein in Kobe?' We couldn't give direct answers. My immediate thought was, Well, he doesn't want to play with Kobe if we can't answer that question."

"I just never felt like the Lakers put as much effort into the building-the-team part of it," says an agent who once had a free agent decline a Lakers offer. "I saw some things in the players' parking lot. Conversations between Bynum and his people and some people with the Lakers. It got pretty rough and heated."

"It's horrendous. It's evil. It's a hard drug to quit when you're winning," says a front office executive from a rival team who knows everyone involved well. "Kobe has cost the Lakers dearly in human capital. Kobe has hurt a lot of people. In some cases jeopardized careers."

IN JULY 2013, after one tumultuous season in LA, Dwight Howard had reached free agency with a flood of carefully arranged meetings with the Rockets, Hawks, Mavericks, Warriors and Lakers. For the Lakers, it was a dry run for the 2014 recruiting game. Could they persuade a major star to stay with Bryant?

The Lakers meeting took place in Beverly Hills on July 2 in the modernist, windowless conference room at Relativity Media -- the offices of Howard's agent. Kupchak, Howard's closest ally on the team, prepped the Lakers' pitch. One big point: Listen carefully. Another: Dress appropriately. "Our approach," a Lakers source explained at the time, "is that we are interviewing for the job. We want to show that this is a place his dreams can come true."

As the Lakers' contingent settled into the conference room's ergonomic chairs, it was clear that two-time MVP point guard Steve Nash, in a nice crisp shirt, listening attentively, was running Kupchak's game plan. But Bryant showed up, according to a person in the room, in "hoops shorts, a T-shirt and a gold chain." He had also packed an attitude.

When Howard asked why his teammates let the injured center take all the flak when the Lakers' season went south, Nash said he didn't know that Howard had felt that way and that had he known, he would have acted differently. Bryant, on the other hand, offered a crash course in developing thick skin and a mini lecture on learning how to win. Sources told ESPN Insider Chris Broussard that Bryant's lecture was "a complete turnoff" for Howard.

"It wasn't an easy meeting to be involved in," Kupchak later said on Cowherd's radio show. "And I decline to go into great detail." Howard shortly thereafter chose to leave for the Rockets, even though it cost him roughly $30 million in guaranteed salary.

The story of the Lakers' losing Howard has been told as one of the big man chafing under Mike D'Antoni's offense. One Lakers source, though, says Howard's issue wasn't really with the offensive scheme but that "he saw one particular player play outside that scheme with carte blanche, with no accountability. These people who say Dwight couldn't handle the pressure of Los Angeles ... that's nonsense. LA was everything Dwight wanted. To be celebrated. To be among stars. To be among women of this caliber. To live, basically, in one big reality TV show. This was a perfect setting for him."

Bryant, who declined through a Lakers spokesman to comment for this story, playfully grumbles about today's youth and their newfangled ways, but there really is an element to his play that is from the past. By the old points-per-game measure, he was not just a perennial All-Star but one of the best players ever. But the league has changed around Bryant, and swiftly. The movement of people and the ball, 3s, rim attacks, coordinated defensive effort and generating open shots for teammates are what's winning now. Subsuming ego and glorifying teammates is a winning NBA strategy, and it's what D'Antoni and Nash attempted to bring to the Lakers.

After his first year with Bryant, Nash couldn't hide his disappointment when talking to Grantland's Zach Lowe: "I think it'd be nice to find a middle ground where he does his thing but the ball still can move for great parts of the game. ... But I knew it wasn't going to be the same. When you play with Kobe Bryant, the ball is gonna be with him most of the time."

Or it will be, at least, until he shoots it. Bryant has fired away for nearly two decades. He's fourth on the NBA's all-time scoring list, trailing only Kareem, Karl Malone and Michael Jordan. He's also just a few weeks' play from setting an all-time league record for misses. "The problem is, he's just not as good as he thinks he is," says one source in the Lakers' inner circle. "He's just not as efficient as he thinks he is. If he had the other intangibles, like LeBron, or if he was any kind of different person, it would have been easy for us to attract talent, retain it and win."

SO WHY LAST November did the Lakers, knowing all this, extend Bryant's contract two more years? Why not declare victory and walk away from the quagmire of late-stage Bryant? To answer that, we must first understand the predicament of the Lakers' executive VP of player personnel, Jim Buss -- a man who earned final say over basketball decisions because his father, Jerry Buss, bequeathed it to him upon his death in 2013.

A bequeathal is nice, yet there will always be challenges to his power. For years, a who's who of the NBA world have taken cheap shots at Jim. In 2005, columnist Peter Vecsey introduced the younger Buss to the public, in the pages of the New York Post, as a "professional party animal." On ESPN, Magic Johnson once said that he loved Jerry Buss but added, "I don't believe in Jim Buss." He has also discussed Jim's "critical mistakes" in running the team.

Then there's Phil Jackson. By 2011, he was the departing coach of the Lakers, a colleague of Jim's in the upper reaches of the Lakers and, of course, quasi family by nature of his long-term relationship with Jim's sister Jeanie. But when Jackson was leaving the Lakers, he told reporters, "I haven't spoken to Jimmy Buss this year. As far as management, if you want to call it that, there's really not a relationship." Jim, meanwhile, has said he considers Phil "family." If you want to call it that. Jeanie has talked of the "betrayal" she felt when D'Antoni was hired instead of Jackson seven games into the 2012-13 season.

"When you play with Kobe Bryant, the ball is gonna be with him most of the time." - Steve Nash

Fair or not, the effect of these comments has been to give Jim precious little credibility in the eyes of Lakers fans. Here the legacy of his father looms large. Famed for consorting with teenagers, partying and gambling, the Lakers' patriarch was not known for following rules. But as Magic made clear to reporters in the early days of the Shaq-Kobe feud, Jerry Buss had a certain way of doing things: "Our whole organization has been built on the fact that we've always taken care of our own. We've never aired our dirty laundry."

That's how it used to be done, anyway, before Jackson and Bryant changed the MO. Jim is one of the last remaining Lakers who still follow his father's rule. Jackson may snipe at Buss, but Buss won't snipe back, or at any other Laker. Meanwhile, Bryant is more than willing to give the front office a public tongue-lashing if it suits his needs.

All of which set up Jim to be timid with Bryant. Even as many of his closest advisers insisted the right move was to kiss Bryant goodbye via the amnesty clause -- the cash savings alone would have been north of $70 million, by some estimates -- Buss, sources say, had no appetite for picking a fight with the Mamba, or for the damage to his reputation it might cause.

There were also business rationales to keeping Bryant. The first is that the Lakers are the opposite of a typical NBA team, as a business. Yes, they have more revenue. But they require tons more because the Lakers are the family business. In most ownership groups, nobody is relying on the team as the prime revenue stream; the team is the high-risk end of a much bigger portfolio. In LA, the team is the linchpin supporting six heirs.

And there is no more important income than the 20-year, $3 billion Time Warner deal to broadcast Lakers games locally. One well-placed source who has reviewed Lakers team finances says the Lakers' annual income from that deal hinges on ratings, which tend to go up when Bryant is on the court. If the team had jettisoned Bryant and tanked the past season in the name of a high 2014 draft pick, the resulting low ratings would have smacked the business of the Lakers hard.

That's presumably part of the reason Kupchak has been outspokenly anti-tanking; his bosses won't tell him to outright tank because tanking costs them a fortune. Meanwhile, it's not as if Bryant didn't have his supporters. Lakers season-ticket holders are a who's who of power brokers and celebrities, and in what one Lakers insider believes was a coordinated effort, many called Jim to make clear they expected him to bring Bryant back.

And so it was that Jim resolved to skip a public battle with Bryant by signing him early. The younger Buss also "didn't want contract negotiations to go public," according to a source. And in getting it done smoothly, the idea was that Jim could appear "magnanimous and loyal," like his father, who made waves by giving Magic and Shaq eye-poppingly huge deals.

The Lakers take care of their own. "This is Jim's way of providing a parting gift," says a source with knowledge of the negotiations.

Meanwhile, merely keeping Bryant around would, paradoxically, help them say goodbye to him later with less fuss. "This allows fans to come to grips with the reality that they cannot keep winning with him," says the source. "Jim can part ways with Kobe without being seen as betraying him. When he stops playing at a high level, you can begin the transition."

Conspiracy theorists might note Kupchak's odd quote in the team press release at the time of Bryant's extension, which seemed to leave little wiggle room for another deal after this one: "We've said all along that our priority and hope was to have Kobe finish his career as a Laker, and this should ensure that that happens. To play 20 years in the NBA, and to do so with the same team, is unprecedented, and quite an accomplishment." And although Kupchak declined through a Lakers spokesman to comment for this story, he has ever-so-subtly made clear that he didn't dream up Bryant's deal, telling the Los Angeles Times: "It's been ownership's position that he deserved every penny, or will deserve every penny of that extension."