We now rejoin the Lakers' dynasty already in progress ...

"Blood in the water," Rick Fox said last week, and that was before Kobe Bryant leveled Samaki Walker with both barrels.

All is not well in the kingdom. The Lakers are reeling, even with Shaquille O'Neal back on the floor, because he's not upper-case Shaq, not F5-level Shaq, just yet. (He's still the best center in the league by a mile or so, in case you were wondering.) If the season ended now, the Lakers would be in the lottery, not the playoffs, and a certain television network (and its cable partner) would not feel marvelous.

	Phil Jackson has yet to get the Lakers in sync.

"Seventy wins is still a goal for us," Phil Jackson joked last week, when the Lakers were only 5-11. Jackson blames himself in part for L.A.'s tough start, maintaining that he may have set expectations too low by acknowledging the possibility of an 0-7 start out of the gate without O'Neal. When the Lakes started 0-2, Bryant professed staying calm, saying he loved the way his teammates were playing. Last week, his tone changed.

"We've been out of sync all season," Bryant said. "With Shaquille back in the mix, things will be a little easier and we'll be more competitive. But all in all, our flow just has to get better. We have to get guys healthy. I understand Samaki has the back problem and he's hurting, but he's not hurting any more than I am. I'm out there playing my butt off every single night. Hurt, bad ankle, can't walk, don't matter. I'm out there playing. And he should be out there playing as well."

It was the second time Bryant had trashed Walker in my presence this season, but the L.A. beat guys say there was a third dissing, which is a lot for the first month of the season. But that's where the back-to-back-to-backers are right now.

The onus is not only on Jackson and the players but on general manager Mitch Kupchak. Three years of getting very little from their offseason acquisitions (Isaiah Rider, Lindsey Hunter, Mitch Richmond) have left L.A. vulnerable. The bench has been nothing more than a rumor for two years, while aging contributors Ron Harper, Horace Grant and A.C. Green left the scene. This season hasn't been much different, with Tracy Murray, Soumaila Samake and rookies Kareem Rush and Jannero Pargo generally unproductive. I wonder if a call to the Wizards about Charles Oakley is forthcoming.

"Phil has been hesitant to go to some of these guys," Fox said. "Because we don't have a margin for experimentation. And at times when he's been forced to -- foul trouble, injuries -- it's been evident that the learning curve has been a little slow for them ... having to make up a lot of ground, there's not going to be a whole lot of time to experiment. I've been averaging about 40 minutes a game, and it's apparent, 'cause I have to be out there, as well as Rob (Horry) and Derek (Fisher). It doesn't bode well for us to go a whole season of 82 games with the key five or six guys that have been here winning championships having to log those kinds of minutes."

I am reminded of the Detroit Parallel. In the fall of 1990, the Pistons were going for a threepeat, but they were running on fumes. Four straight seasons of making the conference finals or better had added an extra season's worth of wear and tear on Detroit's core, and the Pistons' success left them with the likes of Fred Banks, Fennis Dembo, Kenny Battle and Lance Blanks in the draft. The 1989 expansion draft had taken away Rick Mahorn; injuries limited Isiah Thomas in '90-91 to 48 regular-season games. Detroit went 50-32 in the regular season, but in the Eastern finals, the Bulls were younger, hungrier and promptly swept the two-time champs.

Substitute the Kings for the Bulls, and you see where I'm going.

	“	Right now, you'd think we're all rookies, the way we're playing. Everybody's been waiting on Shaq to get back, but it's going to take more than just Shaq. It's going to take the whole squad. ”
		— Robert Horry

"It's looking at us right in our face," Fox acknowledged. "The first year, we were deep. You (had) Robert, myself and Derek coming off the bench that first year, and we won 67 games. The next year, we were deep enough, in that we went 15-1 (in the playoffs). We just hit it. We just clicked. Derek had sat out 60-something games, so he was fresh. I think Kobe and Shaq sat out stretches of games, so we got healthy and we got on track right at the end there. Last year, I think it showed. Last year, we were up and down, up and down, burned out, beat up, not very deep, came to the end of the season where we put together a good run, but it's that thing again where you're rolling the dice and you've been able to get away with it."

Horry feels "terrible," with a bad finger that probably won't get better all season, a bad foot, a bad quad ... you get the idea. With no real answer at power forward, Horry has to do some of the "meat and grunt work," as Jackson puts it, well before he normally shows up in the playoffs. The Lakers gave Devean George $20 million in the offseason, but he's been out with a bad ankle suffered against Portland the second night of the season. Fox missed the first six games due to suspension after his ill-timed preseason fight with Doug Christie. Jackson thinks his squad is giving 75 to 80 percent effort many nights. "We're playing hard, but not hard enough," he says.

"Right now, you'd think we're all rookies, the way we're playing," Horry said. "Everybody's been waiting on Shaq to get back, but it's going to take more than just Shaq. It's going to take the whole squad."

I don't think the Lakers are done by any stretch. All they have to do, after all, is make the playoffs, and then the advantage in age and coaching -- and Shaq and Kobe -- becomes prohibitive. The problem is they're going to have to play at such a fierce level until then just to catch up to the Kings and Mavs and Spurs that one wonders how much they'll have left in the tank for the postseason.

The team went to Shaq's crib at Isleworth, the tony gated community in Orlando that is home to Tiger, T-Mac and the like, for Thanksgiving dinner. Fitting, because rescuing this season may be the tallest order the LCL has ever had to fill.

David Aldridge, who covers the NBA for ESPN, is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.