When your team back home has just traded for Dwight Howard, managed to acquire Steve Nash before that and swings both of those blockbusters without surrendering Pau Gasol, you can put up with some annoyances.

So Kobe Bryant wasn’t about to complain about his scoreless second half or the 16 consecutive questions afterward — yes, 16 in a row — that had nothing to do with the gold-medal game that Bryant and the rest of Team USA had just reached.

For your scorebooks at home: Make that 18 more 3-pointers for the United States, 16 straight Dwight queries for Kobe in the mixed zone before a single mention of these Olympics and a 109-83 shredding of Manu Ginobili and the rest of his Argentinian “brothers,” as Andres Nocioni describes the group, that have caused so much trouble for USA Basketball since this rivalry began a decade ago in Indianapolis.

That’s a Friday to truly be thankful for the thirtysomething wearing No. 10.

“Sometimes,” Bryant excitedly told ESPN.com, “things just tend to work out.”

via Marc Stein of ESPN