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+ Bryant is black and Bird ain't.
The dynamic of that Celtics team seemed different. It's probably homerism, but I don't think the majority of Lakers would respond positively to Kobe pretty much saying, "You guys sucked at D" (because, let's face it, he's not calling himself out because he hasn't been sucking).
+ Bryant is black and Bird ain't.
Let's not start getting testy Culby.
Kobe scores 24 of his team's points in a row, and then wonders why everyone is standing around watching him dribble?
He has never been able to toe the line between scorer and a guy that gets his team involved. Jordan somehow managed it. Magic obviously did.
But with Kobe, it seems that he dominates possessions so thoroughly that he causes other players to be passive.
I guess you can blame his teammates for being too passive, but at the same time, it's pretty hard to do much on offense that's meaningful when one guy has put up 24 in a row. Kobe might have saved them in the 3rd, but he doomed them in the 4th when he wasn't as accurate and the rest of the players were coasting.
You can lay the blame at the feet of Gasol, I guess, but he got 12 rebounds last night to lead everyone, so he was obviously working hard. And he had a good jumpshot.
Kobe just never looks to shred the defense with his passing, IMO. Sure, he has stretches where he can be good at getting assists, but it's never seemed like it's a priority to him to make sure his team is involved, unless he's making the "oh look I can pass the ball" point to Phil and the media.
They're all fully grown men, Cry.
Act like somebody and get on with it.
You ever played basketball?
You ever played for 20 minutes at a time without getting the ball and then suddenly you're fed the rock and expected to have rhythm for a jumpshot?
This isn't about grown men needing to man up. It's about the simple fact that the human body operates on rhythms and cycles. Take that away from someone and they are going to struggle to perform any task at the highest level.
Soccer, football, baseball, you name it. Remove a player's rhythm, and it's difficult to expect them to step up. It's the same reason that managers hesitate to subs ute batters in late in a game in crunch time to get a big hit if they haven't swung the bat all game.
Yes, it is. And it's about nothing else.
You ever played basketball for 20 minutes at a time without getting the ball and then suddenly you're fed the rock and expected to have rhythm for a jumpshot?
Do real men need to score as much as possible (81 points?) to show the world how much of a man they are?
I'm not a professional basketball player, Cry. They are. Act like it.
So despite the fact that Gasol got 12 rebounds and had a solid jumper, and none of Boston's bigs could handle Odom (who shot 4-6) off the pick n roll last night, it's their fault for not stepping up?
The only Laker I saw last night that flat out sucked was Artest, and he can't be taken out for long stretches because the Lakers need his defense, but wow, that guy is Antione Walker incarnate on offense right now.
Kobe's the leader of this team, and he's had several horrible outings himself in the Finals. I don't see why the blame shifts to his teammates because he got hot in one quarter. He's a professional basketball player and wants to be the leader, has patterned his game after the GoaT. Why does he need to scream at his team after the game to step up?
Because they're not performing their jobs.
Does that mean Kobe's teammates should have been screaming at him after games 2, 3, and 4? How do you think he would have handled Derek Fisher yelling at him to man up? Not well, would be my guess.
Also: Isn't it the responsibility of a leader to, you know, LEAD the team? Scoring a lot doesn't equal leading. You can talk to Allen Iverson about that.
There is yelling and screaming back and forth on every team, Cry, even your Spurs.
And yet, even in Duncan's most dominant years, you never saw players and the media en masse come out and wonder aloud why he didn't get his teammates more involved. You never saw another teammate in a dispute with him about touches or points scored.
Leaders lead, and they take the blame if their team doesn't follow. If Kobe isn't a leader, that's fine, but that's the standard that all of the NBA greats are held to. Kobe has earned the reputation of a player who wants the spotlight on him over the past decade in this league. Now the spotlight is on him, and if his team loses, guess what? History isn't going to remember Derek Fisher or Ron Artest as the player that was on the Lakers the two years they lost to the Celtics.
to make things short, not kobe's fault the lakers lost game 5, but it is his fault that the lakers are down 3-2.
It's because Kobe takes bad shots in doing so. Sometimes he gets on fire like he was last night and makes them, but he consistently tries to take over by taking dumb, low percentage shots, hoping his talent and athleticism will allow him to keep making them. If he was trying to score in a more efficient, high percentage manner, the way Jordan would do, it's probably a different story, and his teammates would still feel more involved.
Also, Jordan's teammates had more respect for him than Kobe's teammates do. They most likely thought Jordan was a , just like Kobe's teammates obviously think he's a , but Jordan's teammates feared displeasing Jordan, because he commanded their respect in a much different way than Kobe does.
I just think it's way more than a coincidence that Kobe has been very lackluster in this series, and in the one game where he goes off, the rest of the Lakers play very poorly on offense. I think it's fairly obvious why that is.
Nevertheless their is screaming and yelling in every locker room. Even the Spurs, Cry.
I would have loved to have seen the rest of the Lakers call Kobe out when he was doing his typical 41% Finals shooting performance in the first four games.
The Lakers problem is on offense, and if Bryant can't figure out how to make his guys better, then he deserves to lose. All he can do is score. If he was a tenth as good as he thinks he is, the Lakers would beat everybody like a drum.
Seriously, who picked Boston to beat LA? Maybe 10% of the population outside Massachusetts.
And you're delusional if you think any other Laker player besides maybe Gasol can EVER yell at or talk to Kobe at any point of any game in the season.
wouldnt you be mad if its was 1 on 5, and you still had a shot to win
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