STEVE BISHEFF California wildfires outweigh the Lakers' 'Crisis'

LOS ANGELES -- The town is shrouded in smoke, and Lakers fans only want to talk about the team's "crisis."
Lives and homes are being lost, and the main topic at Staples Center is still who should get more shots, Shaq or Kobe.
Flames are flickering into the sky in a 200-mile arc from Simi Valley to San Diego and Mexico, and the biggest issue on the night Phil Jackson's team opens its season with an easy, if somewhat sloppy, 109-93 victory on Tuesday night against the Dallas Mavericks is which of the coach's two incumbent superstars is being more immature.
Before we get too deep into this strange battle between one peevish player and another, maybe we should step back and try to put all this into some kind of perspective.
There are other things more serious -- much more serious -- than two multi-millionaire athletes trying to decide whose team this really is.
If the basketball world is holding its breath over these latest ugly salvos in L.A., the rest of the world is not.
Lost his home
A good friend of many among the local sports media, former Rams public relations director Rick Smith, lost his home amid the raging fires in San Diego's Scripps Ranch area Monday. A lot of us find that much more disturbing than the fact that Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant are feuding again.
Excuse me, but are we supposed to be feeling sorry for these two spoiled jocks who make a combined $38 million a year? Are we really supposed to be worried about how this latest conflict shakes out?
Maybe under normal circumstances we would be. Maybe if all this desolation wasn't surrounding us like so much confetti-like ash, we could be more concerned about Game 1 of an 82-game regular season that really only serves as a precursor to the playoffs.
Maybe if much of Southern California didn't seem to be burning to the ground, we wouldn't have felt so foolish sitting there before the game, listening to Jackson try to explain why Bryant suddenly wasn't in the starting lineup against the Mavericks.
Coach and situation
Someone asked the coach if "the situation" might have had anything to do with Bryant not playing.
"It certainly could," Jackson said.
Would he be on the bench during the game? "At some point," Jackson said.
That point proved to be with 17 seconds left in the third period, when Bryant, who supposedly had been working out to improve his "sore knee," suddenly jogged out of the tunnel in a bright red T-shirt and sat down next to -- who else? -- O'Neal and half-heartedly slapped the Big Fella on his knee.
Shaq didn't respond. He didn't even look his way. Moments later, the period ended, and Bryant was greeting the rest of his teammates with high fives.
The crowd, naturally, was chanting "Ko-be ... Ko-be ... Ko-be ..."
Bryant saw himself on the Jumbotron, with the fans cheering him, and he smiled and waved.
Reception
All of which made you wonder what kind of reception he might have received if he still wasn't facing that sexual assault charge in Colorado. Not that any true Lakers fans really seem to care.
The Kobe situation is not going away.
"We have to assume he's working with a variety of issues here," Jackson said before the game.
You think? He is facing a trial that could send him to prison and a teammate who would like to send him out of town. Other that, everything is fine and tranquil in Lakerville, where the crowd was happy and cheering and the temperatures in the air-conditioned Staples Center made breathing feel, well, almost normal.
Too bad the fans then had to filter out into the real world, where the smoke was still swirling and the fires were still growing just a few scary miles away.
XBisheff is a sports columnist with Orange County Register.