65. 50. 60. 50. 43.

Those are Kobe Bryant’s point totals in an amazing five-game stretch. The Lakers’ star guard has averaged 53.6 points a game while resurrecting his club’s teetering playoff hopes, as L.A. won all five games after dropping 13 of its previous 16.

Kobe’s incredible streak was all the more astonishing because it was so unexpected. In the two games prior to his explosion, he shot a combined 15-for-38 in a pair of blowout losses and failed to make a single 3-pointer.

But seen in the bigger picture, Bryant’s scoring explosion is a continuation of what he was doing a year ago, when he averaged a whopping 35.4 points a game and carried a largely talent-bereft team to the playoffs.

The start of this year, however, played out differently, as Bryant had to take it easy in the beginning of the season after off-season knee surgery. In fact, he was still recovering when the year began and, after missing the first two regular-season games, suited up for Game 3 without an iota of training camp.

That explains why his November numbers were so pedestrian by his standards. In 13 contests, he averaged “only” 26.2 points a game, and, perhaps more important, he shot just 3.6 3-pointers a night — a telltale sign that he didn’t feel he had his legs under him yet.

Ironically, this earned Bryant plaudits in a roundabout way. The Lakers got off to a hot start, thanks in part to a heavy early slate of home games. When people inevitably began casting about for a simple, analysis-free reason, they pointed to Bryant’s seeming unselfishness as the reason. The logic went that Bryant was reducing his own scoring by deferring more to the likes of Lamar Odom and Luke Walton, and thus allowed those players to blossom.

But the reality behind Bryant’s lack of offensive assertiveness wasn’t some newfound esprit de corps. It was because he couldn’t dominate in the way he’d been accustomed to a year earlier, not with his knee still recuperating, a new ball to adjust to, and an onthe-job training camp. His numbers picked up during the next three months, but they never approached his explosion of a year ago.

Then the All-Star Break came around, and it’s my hypothesis that the rest the break gave him, along with his finally being caught up in his recuperation and training camp, is what gave him his recent spark.

Others will disagree with me — in fact, many point to Laker coach Phil Jackson’s recent complaints about an anti-Bryant “witch hunt” as the reason. Bryant has been suspended twice this year for tagging an opposing defender with an elbow after getting his shot blocked, including a one-game ban after nailing Minnesota’s Marko Jaric on March 6. Three days later, the league assessed him a flagrant foul for chopping Philadelphia’s Kyle Korver in the cheek with an elbow while dribbling on March 9.

Jackson himself felt that was the cause. “Do you remember there was a suspension about two weeks ago?” Jackson said after the fourth game in the streak. “I think this has motivated him.”

However, I find that explanation unsatisfying. I’m sure the sense that the league was after him might have provided some small measure of motivation, but for it to produce results like this is tantamount to saying Bryant wasn’t playing hard before the whole brouhaha happened. Are we really saying that Bryant is such a sloth the rest of the time that a sudden burst of motivation can cause him to double his scoring average?

That’s why the wounded-knee theory holds more water in my book. Look at Bryant’s seven games after the All-Star break but before the Jaric suspension. He put up 32.1 points a game even though his shot wasn’t falling (42.0%), because he was able to take nearly 12 free-throw attempts per game. Compare that with his pre-break numbers (28.9 points, 9.3 free-throw attempts per game) and it’s clear he was already feeling more chipper — he just needed some jumpers to fall.

And fall they did. With a fivegame slate against the league’s lesser lights, Bryant shot 52.6% in his five-game tear, catapulted by a suddenly torrid 3-point stroke (21 for 44). If you sit down and compare this five-game streak with the seven games after the break, what you’ll notice is that Bryant’s shooting percentage and minutes changed a lot more than his shot attempts.

Per 40 minutes, Bryant averaged 25.0 field-goal attempts per game in the games right after the break, and 29.6 in his five-game streak. That would normally produce an uptick in scoring of about five a game; the reason Bryant’s gain was so massive was partly because he shot the ball more accurately, and partly because he played a ton of minutes — an average of 46.6 per game.

That’s not to take away from anything Bryant has done. I still argue that his 81-point game against Toronto last year is the single greatest regular-season outing in NBA history, better than even Wilt’s 100-point night once you adjust for pace and era. These games don’t rank too far behind, with the 65-point explosion against Portland a particular favorite since the Lakers needed every one of those points to prevail in overtime.

But seen in the bigger picture, this was coming for a while. Bryant has been building up his capacity to play long minutes and pile up points all season, and this past week we’ve seen fruits of that labor.

Nonetheless, there are some important lessons here looking ahead. First, Bryant is unlikely to keep scoring at this clip on a pergame basis between now and the playoffs because the Lakers are unlikely to keep playing him 46 minutes a game when their playoff spot is all but sewn up.

Second, Bryant’s own performance will continue to swing depending on how well the jumper is falling. Sometimes, it will yield stretches like the one after the break, where L.A. went 3–4 despite Bryant’s averaging 32 a game because he was missing so many shots. Other times, it will produce the brilliance of the past five games, all Laker wins.

All of that makes the Lakers a very scary opponent for the postseason. But deconstructing Bryant’s brilliant five-game tear tells us that it probably wasn’t about anger as much as it was three other simple facts: His knee feels better, he’s playing a lot of minutes, and his jumper is falling. As long as that continues, so will the scoring explosions.

jhollinger@nysun.com