If Kobe misses Shaq, he’ll have plenty of time to watch the big fella on TV this spring.

Bryant and the Lakers were officially eliminated from the playoffs when they were blown off the floor by Phoenix on Tuesday night. With the team’s epitaph written, it’s time to figure out where the NBA’s premier franchise went wrong – and how to put it right.

Bryant will take the lion’s share of the blame, and he certainly deserves it. He looks foolish for having strong-armed the Lakers into trading Shaquille O’Neal and dumping Phil Jackson, conditions he could enforce because he was considered the team’s top free-agent priority at the time. The O’Neal trade proved especially disastrous – Shaq is sitting atop the Eastern Conference in Miami. Meanwhile, the Lakers have struggled to get consistent post play all season.

Bryant hasn’t helped matters with his play on the court. While he’s performed at an All-Star level, he’s also sacrificed quality for quantity at the offensive end. Bryant ranks third in the league in scoring at 27.6 points per game, but has converted only 43% from the floor and too often stops the offensive flow to go one-on-one.

Still, pinning all the blame on Kobe is shortsighted. A multitude of problems have conspired to banish the Lakers to the lottery, and the fingers pointed at Bryant should instead target Lakers General Manager Mitch Kupchak.

What could the Lakers have done differently? For starters, Kupchak could have passed on Vlade Divac, whom the Lakers signed away from rival Sacramento before the season. While I’m sure that made Kupchak feel good, the aging big man didn’t address a need. The Lakers already had Chris Mihm and Lamar Odom up front, not to mention Brian Grant, Brian Cook, and Slava Medvedenko. That ended up being a moot point – Divac has been hurt all year – but the Lakers were unwise to waste their salary-cap exception on Vlade.

That money should have been used to add a decent point guard. Starter Chucky Atkins is short, old, and slow, which is one reason the Lakers force the fewest turnovers in the league. Meanwhile, backup Tierre Brown is a CBA player posing as a pro. Had the Lakers signed a real point guard (i.e. Mike James or Bob Sura) instead of Divac, they wouldn’t be in this bind.

For more depth, Kupchak should have eliminated the logjam at small forward. Caron Butler, Devean George, Luke Walton, and Jumaine Jones all play the same position, and any of the four – who are often forced to play out of position – could have been traded for the decent backcourt reserve the club so desperately needs.

Still, the Lakers had a winning record before Rudy Tomjanovich resigned on February 2. That part was beyond Kupchak’s control, but the man he promoted, Frank Hamblen, couldn’t have been a worse pick for the job. When Rudy T. stepped down, the Lakers were 24-19 (with Bryant missing nine of those games) and in control of the no. 8 seed in the West. Since then, they’re a 9-22 laughingstock, including nine losses in their past 10 games.

Lamar Odom’s injury certainly played a role in the slide, but a large portion of the blame belongs to Hamblen. Suffice it to say, he didn’t jump into his new gig with guns blazing.

“I just feel like I’m keeping the seat warm,” Hamblen told reporters immediately after taking the job.” I’d love for Phil [Jackson] to come back any day, to be honest with you.”

Allow me to translate: “Why are they putting me in charge? I had a cushy gig as an assistant coach and was on the golf course by 3 p.m. when it wasn’t a game night. Hopefully they won’t try to make this permanent.”

As you might imagine, Hamblen has found it difficult to earn the players’ respect. If he doesn’t want to be there, why should they? The Lakers have been awful almost from the day he took over, but they’ve been especially bad at the defensive end.

The Lakers were below average defensively under Tomjanovich, but with Hamblen in charge, they’ve simply stopped trying. That’s easily demonstrated with a measure called Defensive Efficiency, which tracks how many points a team allows per 100 possessions. In the Lakers’ case, they’ve given up a whopping 113.3 over the past 10 games.

To put this in perspective, the league average in that span is 104.7. Since teams average about 93 possessions a game, the Lakers have been nearly 10 points a game worse than the rest of the league during this period. Over a full season, that would make them the worst defensive team of all time.

Considering defense is as much effort as it is talent, this is a giant red flag that the Lakers have quit on their coach. Nor is that Hamblen’s only negative. The decision to switch to the triangle offense halfway through the season was curious at best, and young forward Brian Cook disappeared from the rotation for no apparent reason.

There’s still hope for the Lakers next year because they have Kobe, but it won’t be easy. Excepting Bryant, the backcourt needs a complete overhaul, and given the infirmity of Grant and Divac, the Lakers could use another frontcourt body, too. Fortunately, they’ll have a lottery pick that they can use on a point guard and a midlevel exception to use on frontcourt help, so it’s possible L.A.’s playoff drought will be brief.

But between the awful coaching hire and the poor personnel moves, the odds have been stacked against the Lakers all year. So go ahead, blame Kobe if it makes you feel better, but the real problem is upstairs. Bryant’s decision to play GM and dump Shaq and Phil is indefensible, of course, but Kupchak did the rest of the damage without any help from his players.

In fact, this franchise had been rotting from the inside long before the damage became visible. Kupchak’s moves this year only echo the other poor decisions he’s made since succeeding Jerry West. Kupchak’s draft picks have struggled, and his free agent decisions have been questionable, especially the millions he threw at Devean George and Samaki Walker.

In the past, the Shaq-Kobe-Phil triumvirate was enough to overcome those missteps, but in this brave new world, the Lakers are finding that Kupchak’s mistakes catch up to them quickly. Having to watch Shaq play in the Finals will just add insult to injury.