His Heat,still without Shaquille O'Neal, who's recovering from knee surgery,are floundering, yet are only 3 1/2 games out of first place in the Southeast Division with a 12-14 record.

Defending the title has not been easy for Miami, which has not had its projected starting five of Wade, Udonis Haslem, Jason Williams, O'Neal and Antoine Walker together on the floor yet this season.

"I've got to try to get away from trying to put it all on my shoulders and say 'OK, Dwyane, you've got to go make every play,"' Wade says. "I've got to continue to trust my teammates, continue to trust that we will turn it around,because we will turn it around. Trying times will judge a team. Trying times will judge a man."

Just as the last two Heat-Lakers Christmas games were billed as "Kobe vs. Shaq" extravaganzas fueled by rivalry between the former Tinseltown teammates, this one comes with a tangible sense of "Kobe vs. Dwyane."

Bryant is averaging 33.8 points to Wade's 23.6 in five head-to-head meetings. But Wade has come away with the win in three of those.

"Two great players," says Heat forward Dorell Wright, one of Wade's closest friends. "Kobe and D-Wade are two of the three best players in the NBA, along with Shaq. It's going to be fun."

Wade cringes at any notion of a Dwyane-versus-Kobe sort of buildup.

"Kobe makes you step your game up, step your leadership up," Wade says, "because you know he's going to do the same. But it's not a 1-on-1 matchup. It's not about that, at the end of the day."

In an 11-minute conversation this past week with The Associated Press, Wade used the word "blessing" four times.

It applies to his newfound fame and fortune. It applies to becoming an NBA champion at 24.

It applies to his son, Zaire, now 4, and the new baby Dwyane and Siohvaughn are poised to welcome in about five months.

And he used the word when talking about spending a few hours three days before Christmas with those 250 kids who ate, drank, ran with him through the laser tag room and had a free throw contest,in which, by the way, one kid outscored both Wade and Wright, who came along for the party.

"When he does things like this, often he'll say that if someone did something like it or came where he lived and did something like this for children when he was a kid, that'd have made a difference in his life," Siohvaughn Wade says. "He says that often. So he's out to tell these kids something they need to know,that there's something more out there for them. That's what Christmas means to us now."

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