DON'T WORRY ABOUT KOBE.

Byline: KAREN CROUSE

I can't get inside Kobe Bryant's head. All the same, I'm certain he's going to have a huge game tonight when the Lakers look to even their best-of-seven NBA Finals series against Philadelphia.

You don't have to be a brain surgeon to know this is so. It was obvious just looking at Bryant at practice Thursday that his parietal lobe wears the pants in his cerebrum.

The Lakers' shooting star of a guard walked onto the Staples Center court and he was laughing and joking as though he had delivered a superlative performance the night before instead of a substandard one.

``He was being himself,'' is how teammate Horace Grant put it.

Bryant did appear to have shaken off his 7-of-22 shooting, six-turnover exhibition in the Lakers' 107-101 overtime loss to the 76ers the way one might a bad dream.

After practice he sat, unflinching, in front of a room of reporters, staying until there were no more questions. He remained perfectly poised, even when his poor shooting percentage was thrown back in his face, even when someone wondered if he felt he had let his team down.

Anybody ruled by their frontal lobe, that part of the brain that regulates such higher-order functions as planning, thinking and worrying, would have staggered off the podium, his head spinning with negative thoughts.

Bryant sauntered off, as you'd expect of someone whose frontal lobe is utterly dominated by his parietal lobe, which controls spatial orientation, muscle movement and such. Like most sports superstars, Bryant is wired differently. Or had you not noticed that when his game goes bad, he doesn't get anxious, he gets awesome?

``He's able to shake it off,'' Grant said. ``Kobe's not normal. He's going to come back and have a Kobe Bryant-type game. One bad performance doesn't say what type of player Kobe is. I'm looking for some big things out of Kobe (tonight) because he looks at the last game as history. He doesn't let it bother him.''

No kidding. In the season opener at Portland, Bryant committed seven turnovers and missed 7 of 11 shots from the field on his way to 14 points. The next night he burned Utah for 31 points.

Bryant followed a 15-point performance at Houston with a 32-point showing at San Antonio and chased a 17-point outing against Vancouver with 40 points at Toronto two days later.

Given the 22-year-old's track record, you can understand why Lakers forward Robert Horry said of the Sixers, ``I feel sorry for them. Any time Kobe shoots the ball bad like that, the next game he takes care of business.''

Count on his colleagues to chip in to help him out by setting picks and screens to try to spring him in the high post. That should unlock the handcuffs that the Sixers' defenders slapped on Bryant on Wednesday.

If Bryant can drive on Dikembe Mutombo and somehow circumvent his albatross-like wingspan, all the better. Knowing Bryant, he'll find a way.

``I didn't make shots I normally make and they did a good job on me,'' Bryant said when asked about his poor shooting in Game 1. ``You have to give credit where credit's due. They did a good job defensively.''

Imagine that, a player pinning his poor performance on the excellent execution of his rivals instead of on the officiating or his biorhythms or some other lame excuse.

I'd swear Bryant was buttering up the Sixers for tonight's kill, except competition is his jones, his drug of choice. He soaks up challenges the way the average person does compliments.

Remember how Bryant went out of his way to calm Chris Webber when the Kings star was toying with a second technical foul in the first half of Game 4 in the Lakers' second-round series against Sacramento? For the same reason Bryant wanted to beat a Kings team that was at full strength, he takes glee in the gauntlet that the Sixers have thrown down.

``It's a pleasure to play against them, to play against a team that's that competitive,'' Bryant said of feisty Philadelphia.

See what I mean about Bryant being wired differently? There are well- paid, well-heeled players who would retreat into their temporal lobes if Mutombo kept stuffing the basketball down their throats or if Allen Iverson and Eric Snow and Aaron McKie kept rudely interrupting their dribble.

In Bryant's case, any challenge fires up his nerve impulses so his cerebellum lights up like a telephone switchboard.

Will Bryant answer the call to greatness tonight? What do you think?

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Photo:

Kobe Bryant confronted a strong Sixers defense Wednesday that included Dikembe Mutombo. Bryant hit just 7 of 22 shots.

John Lazar/Staff Photographer