Los Angeles Lakers coach Mike Brown really wasn’t making a big deal out of the appointment of forward Pau Gasol as the team’s new co-captain. There was no secret initiation procedure Gasol had to endure. There was no formal ceremony, no tapping of the shoulders with a sword, no ritual sacrifices. Asked about the captaincy and the responsibilities that come with it, Brown shrugged and said that with Derek Fisher having been shipped out, Gasol was the logical choice to join Kobe Bryant in the role.
“He’ll do whatever a captain does,” Brown said. “I am not out there during the game, so whatever a captain should do, he will do. I told the team, we had two captains, obviously, we traded one, and we wanted a second captain. And that second captain is Pau Gasol.”
The title, then, is symbolic for a team that has so often been steadied by the presence of Fisher, a 16-year veteran who joined the Lakers when Bill Clinton was running against Bob Dole, and had played 13 seasons for L.A. In recent years, as Bryant has gotten older and more ornery with teammates, he was balanced by the coolness of Fisher, the ideal good-cop/bad-cop leadership tandem.
“That’s one thing we will miss about Derek,” Lakers forward Matt Barnes said. “He’s been through it all, he has seen it all. He would always stay calm, no matter what was going on.”
One criticism of Gasol has been that he can sometimes be a little too cool, a little too calm. We’ve never really seen Gasol take the reins as a leader in the NBA—which is odd, because he is fiery and vocal when playing internationally with his Spanish national team. When Gasol was the star of the show in Memphis, the team’s coaches and management would prod him into taking a leadership role, which did not seem a comfortable spot for him. With the Lakers, Gasol has been able to sit back and let Bryant and Fisher handle the talking.
Gasol was asked how his leadership style compares to that of Fisher and Bryant. “Different from theirs,” he said. “I think I also have a lot of knowledge, a lot of experience, I have been through a lot of things in my career. I just got to be a little more vocal now that Derek’s somewhere else. I think that we need, Kobe and myself, to step it up.”
Gasol can count the past few weeks—months, even, if you go back to the nixed-trade the Lakers made that would have sent out Gasol for Chris Paul—as part of that experience. He was a trade candidate more than once in Memphis, before he was dealt to the Lakers, and of course, he was one of the biggest names on the market heading into last Thursday’s trading deadline. It seemed so certain that the Lakers would deal him that, last month, Bryant publicly scolded management for letting Gasol twist in the wind. Gasol acknowledged it’s been “a really crazy time.”
But he’s still around. Instead, it was Fisher and forward Luke Walton who were traded, and Gasol, strangely enough, remains a Laker.
“It was good to know that all the talks were over and behind me, and I can move on and focus on playing basketball,” Gasol said. “That was a big relief, a load off my shoulders. It had been pretty exhausting to have to deal with it on a daily basis for the past two-and-a-half and three months. But now it is time to play, and I’m happy to be here and be a part of the team.”
Not just part of the team anymore, though—a captain and, the Lakers hope, a little more of a leader.
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