LOS ANGELES — No, it doesn’t make sense that Shannon Brown was so imperceptible while he was dressing for the lottery-locked Charlotte Bobcats, and so indispensable Wednesday night for the reigning and maybe repeating Western Conference champion Los Angeles Lakers.

Or maybe it makes perfect sense.
Before Game 5, Phil Jackson was thinking about the champion Golden State Warriors of 1975, and how they somehow drew something good from every player. Jackson’s Chicago Bulls were like that, too, getting stuff they needed from Jed Buechler and Steve Kerr and Randy Brown and everyone else on an endless bench.
Brown — an ’06 second-round draft choice, an employee of the Cavaliers, Bulls and Bobcats before landing here in the Vladimir Radmanovic trade of Feb. 7 — is perfect for Jackson’s central casting. He has a role. Usually it’s character acting — defense, explosiveness, a B-12 shot when Laker legs are tired.
Wednesday he had a role, too. Turning around a playoff series.
Brown didn’t play in the first half. With seven minutes left in the third quarter he came in for Derek Fisher. He was not greeted like De Gaulle returning to Paris. The house was crumbling around him, with the Nuggets leading by a comfortable seven.
Brown was in because Chauncey Billups stayed in for Denver. Brown, at 6-foot-4, is at least a physical match.
“That’s all I’ve been saying to myself for years now,” Brown said, laughing. “Stay ready.”
Denver assuredly wasn’t ready for him. He scored when Kobe Bryant was doubled, he slammed over Chris Andersen on a pass from Pau Gasol. The Nuggets’ offense quickly disappeared down a deep fryer, in the back of some McDonald’s somewhere. For an 11 and a half minute stretch, they got three field goals.
The Lakers got the first 11 points of the fourth quarter, the 10th and 11th on a 20-footer by Brown, beating the shot clock, in the midst of a vast inhale by the Staples crowd. That made it 87-78.
Brown came out with 3:30 left, and he gestured for more noise, unnecessarily. With the Lakers up by four, on the way to a 103-94 victory, he was already getting his biggest sendoff since his days on the Michigan State perimeter.
Denver shot 29.3 percent in the second half, and Billups went 1 for 3 in those 24 minutes with two turnovers. Carmelo Anthony was forced to score 17 of the Nuggets’ 38 second-half points, and J.R. Smith, the X factor for Denver, was X-rated, missing all six shots.
Beforehand, Denver coach George Karl mentioned that some Game 5s “provide you with a bounce you can’t overcome.”
The Nuggets now have to find jumpers that don’t bounce off the rim.
“We locked in defensively,” Brown said. “Billups is one of the best. To be one of the best you have to play and beat the best.”
Meanwhile, five Lakers got to double figures and Kobe Bryant discovered that he didn’t have to get 40, or more, to beat the Nuggets. In fact, he took only 13 shots from the floor and the Lakers won impressively, almost as impressively as they won Game 7 against Houston when Bryant also kept the guns holstered.
As the citizens of Cleveland and Orlando have learned, it means very little to have the best player on the floor when the opponent has the second, third, fourth, fifth and maybe sixth-best.
“We just ran the offense the way it’s supposed to be run,” Brown said. “It’s amazing what kind of team we can be when we play as a team, when each guy contributes.”
He said on a night when Lamar Odom put all those slinky, mysterious gifts together, when Andrew Bynum aimed himself at the Denver “bigs” and ran them to the bench, when Fisher hit some jumpers and even when Sasha Vujacic, the erstwhile “Machine” who seemingly hadn’t hit a big shot since the Industrial Revolution, drained a three at the end of the first half.
And Brown?
“This is kind of surreal,” he said. “I’ve just been soaking everything in. I’ve been listening to the veterans and learning what I can. And when something like this happens I just try to get the most of the moment.”
That final jumper reminded him of the backyard in Maywood, Ill., just outside Chicago. “Five, four, three, two, one, shoot it,” he said.
But Brown also looked at Jackson and thought of the Bulls of the ’90s, especially when he wound up playing in the largest fourth quarter of the season. He was five when they won their first championship, 12 when they won their sixth.
“Sometimes,” he said, “everything comes back around.”
One more like this, and the Lakers will come back from Denver by themselves.