AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill Kobe Bryant drives to the basket during Friday's game against New Orleans.

LOS ANGELES -- As Kobe Bryant continues his climb up the all-time scoring list, Bryant will be asked about the names of the legends he has left in his trails. It was Dominique Wilkins on Tuesday, Oscar Robertson on Friday and it will be Hakeem Olajuwan in a couple of weeks. By the end of the season, Bryant should find himself sixth on the all-time list just behind his old friend Shaquille O'Neal.

As a student of the game who has watched film of his predecessors and watches even more film on his contemporaries, Bryant is always respectful, albeit detached when putting the accomplishment into context.

If this were Bryant's last season and his final games, perhaps the finality of passing certain players on the list would resonate with him more, but for a player who plans on playing at least three more years, asking him about passing "The Human Highlight Film" on the all-time scoring list in January is like asking someone how they feel about passing Barstow on the way to Las Vegas.

Vegas in Bryant's eyes, is Michael Jordan, who has 32,292 points. At Bryant's current pace, he will pass Jordan during the 2013-2014 season, which will coincidentally be the last season of his current contract. If Bryant, who will be 36 at the end of the contact, wins a ring or two in the interim, it would not be hard to imagine him using the milestone of passing Jordan on the all-time scoring list as the final exclamation point to his career.

Bryant isn't trying to chase Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's all-time record of 38,387 points or Bill Russell's record of 11 NBA championship rings for a player. Those are untouchable records that will never be broken. The only two numbers Bryant is current chasing are six NBA championship rings (he is one shy of Jordan's total) and 32,292 points (after Friday he is now 5,572 points shy of Jordan's total).

Even if Bryant won't admit he's chasing Jordan, all you need to do is ask Phil Jackson, who wasted no time when he was asked who he thought Bryant was targeting as he moved up the scoring list. "Michael Jordan," Jackson said quickly. "I would imagine that would be the one."

Dilip Vishwanat/Getty Images Phil Jackson and Kobe Bryant seem to have an understanding when it comes to comments about each other in the media.

Each week we'll ask the Brothers Kamenetzky to do a quick read on the state of Mr. Bryant's game.

Kobe Bryant and Phil Jackson have been pretty spirited in their postgame comments of late, sometimes directing comments toward each other through the media, etc. Does this mean anything?

At this point, the two of them are so well in tune with each other, I don't worry about the sort of back and forth that may go on between them. Kobe has said on multiple occasions that Jackson is the only coach he wants to play for. When P.J. was (at least in theory) vascillating on whether or not he wanted to return for this season, Kobe made it clear he wanted him back, just as 24 did when he signed his extension. For his part, Jackson gives Bryant the leeway to take the temperature of a game, and respond accordingly.

(Incidently, that's exactly what Kobe did last week against Memphis when he took over the game in the third quarter, and despite the media kerfuffle following Jackson's postgame comments, he understood the need and didn't object.)

It has taken the two of them time to get to this point, but they seem to understand each other well. Bryant will joke there are times they, at least in basketball terms, seem to finish each other's sentences. Often, when Jackson talks about Bryant and his dominance of the ball (on those occasions where it's warrented), he's speaking as much to Kobe's teammates as Kobe himself. Take care of your space. Don't let him turn things into a one man show. Move, cut, force him to find you with the ball.

What strikes me as interesting is how both seem willing now to use the media when they feel it necessary. Jackson has made a career out of it, but Kobe does it as well. Following the Christmas Day debacle at the hands of the Heat, Bryant spoke in harsh terms about where the team was, how it wasn't tolerable, and what he'd have to do to fix it. Earlier in the week, he mentioned Pau Gasol and Ron Artest by name as people who still struggle with Jackson's coaching style, when it comes to using the press, and said they need to get past it. He's not afraid to send messages, either.

-- Brian Kamenetzky

It depends on which comments you're referring to. If the case of Phil mentioning players being distracted or Kobe saying teammates need to better prioritize the game, the meaning was fairly straightforward and unified: We gotta crank up the urgency, focus and execution at this time of year. It's not enough to be motivated when April rolls around. Something must drive you during the winter months to prevent frittering away any value of the regular season.

As for their comments about each other, I don't think there's much to examine at all, which is actually the larger point.

When Phil made the rather pointed remarks about Kobe over-shooting against the Spurs ("I was playing, I probably wouldn't pass him the ball the next time."), Kobe owned up to his mistake immediately after the game. How well he gauges "takeover" mode throughout the season remains to be seen, but as an isolated incident, Phil's comments weren't disputed. End of story. No controversy.

From there, we had Phil's "Kobe had to screw up the game" comments after the Memphis loss, which were completely overblown by a media fixated on vocabulary and ignoring (willfully or otherwise) context. If you listened to everything Phil said, he was criticizing the supporting cast as much as the superstar's approach, which Kobe knew. Plus, he owned up to his coach's assessment without hesitation. The Lakers had been listless from the opening tip, so he tried something. It didn't work. And as Kobe pointed out, he'll take the heat. Again, no controversy.

And the same can be said about Kobe dismissing Phil's theory about off days begetting bad focus as "zen (nonsense)." It's not a sign of tension brewing, but rather a comfortable partnership.

The words between these two will always garner the most analysis, but the reactions are actually more telling. They've clearly reached a point where honesty can be expressed without the world crumbling.

-- Andy Kamenetzky

Noah Graham/Getty Images Media from coast to coast are chiming in about the latest on Kobe.

Our regular run-down of Kobe sightings in the digital sphere:

• The New York Post's Peter Vecsey does an exclusive phone interview with Bryant and comes away largely impressed from what he hears. And what exactly does he hear? Well, Bryant is pushing through a lot in order to set a positive example for his teammates this season.

"You know how competitive and combative I am on the court," Bryant told Vecsey. "There's nothing I like better than to practice. In fact, I like practice more than the games, because I get to go at my teammates hard. That's when you find out what they're made of, how much you can push some to get the most out of 'em, and how you have to back off others so you don't lose 'em."

• Kobe overnighted a package to Eagles quarterback Michael Vick on Friday. Inside? An autographed jersey, with the words "Be Epic" written inside the numbers on Bryant's uniform. Vick and the Eagles open up the NFL playoffs on Sunday; Bryant is apparently a big fan of Vick as a Philadelphia native.

• Rob Mahoney of the New York Times' basketball blog ranks the most clutch players in the NBA. Kobe doesn't rank among the "cream of the crop," according to Mahoney, but he does apparently earn honorable mention:

"There isn't a player in the league with a more daunting clutch profile, but Bryant's late-game contributions are overstated," Mahoney wrote. "He's been a very productive clutch player this season, but Bryant's tendency to break the offense to take any shot that strikes his fancy has led to some disappointing efficiency marks."

• The Los Angeles NBC affiliate reports that prints of Kobe's hands and feet will be immortalized at the world-famous Grauman's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard in a ceremony sometime in late February. It could end up occurring during All-Star Weekend in Los Angeles, a Grauman's spokesperson told NBC.

--Pedro Moura

Barry Gossage/NBAE/Getty Images Kobe Bryant goes up for a shot against Vince Carter.

Our regular run-down of Kobe sightings in the digital sphere:

• Sports Illustrated's Chris Ballard uses Kobe's recent loss in the game of Pop-A-Shot live on Jimmy Kimmel Live to a busboy as introduction to his long-form study of the game dating back decades. "right in the middle of it all." It turns out that the everyman is often better at the game than the NBA star:

The affair was so one-sided that Bryant, wearing a forced, pained smile, had been obliged to concede -- an act of which I had thought he was incapable. I was awestruck. Who in the world was this little man, this stone-faced marksman who had humbled the NBA superstar at the game of Pop-A-Shot in front of his hometown Los Angeles crowd on Jimmy Kimmel Live?

• The third batch of the NBA All-Star voting results were released Thursday, CBSSports.com's Royce Young writes, and "Nothing much has changed. Kobe Bryant is still leading everyone."

• The Los Angeles Times' Mark Medina presents a photo caption contest to blog readers, asking readers to come up with a good summation for a shot of Kobe and Derek Fisher readying to high five each other with less than a minute remaining in Wednesday's game against the Suns. Medina also writes his takeaways from the picture:

The photo reveals plenty of things: the utmost respect the two have for each other despite the disparity in talent levels, how they have their handshake down pat and that the preceding play sealed the victory.

--Pedro Moura

Christian Petersen/Getty Images Kobe Bryant tries to drive to the basket against Grant Hill of the Phoenix Suns.

Our regular run-down of Kobe sightings in the digital sphere:

• FoxSports.com's Billy Witz details all of the drama surrounding the Lakers in recent days and writes that Kobe is "right in the middle of it all." Witz recaps all of the stories that have come out in the last week and finds what he thinks could be a common chord:

So, did Kobe, who has been known to take matters into his own hands, plant the stories?

"No," Bryant said with a laugh, shaking his head as he walked out of the locker room.

• CBSSports.com's Ben Golliver goes in depth on the numbers Bryant will need to produce over the rest of the career to surpass Michael Jordan as the NBA's third-leading scorer of all time. Bryant can easily reach it, Golliver writes, if he plays a few more years. Passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Karl Malone look like harder tasks, though.

• Kevin Baxter of the Los Angeles Times writes of a routine lay-in Bryant made in the third quarter of Tuesday's win over the Pistons. But it ended up being a little more than routine:

Because with that basket Tuesday he passed Dominique Wilkins to become the 10th-leading scorer in NBA history, an accomplishment so big and so important that nobody even noticed until late in the fourth quarter of the Lakers' 108-83 rout of the Detroit Pistons, when the Staples Center PA announcer told the crowd.

--Pedro Moura