It's no secret that one of the NBA's goals during the 2011 lockout was to achieve more competitive balance throughout the league. Kobe Bryant knows it all too well. Bryant went a step further in a wide-ranging interview with GQ's Chuck Klosterman, stating the lockout happened in order to restrict the Los Angeles Lakers.
Kobe Bryant says the Lakers caused the 2011 lockout
He went in-depth on that view, his history with Phil Jackson and more in a wide-ranging interview with GQ.
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The result of that lockout brought about tougher penalties for high-spending teams like the Lakers, as well as rules that limited flexibility for teams with a high payroll. This clearly still doesn’t sit well with Bryant:
“That lockout was made to restrict the Lakers,” Bryant said. “It was. I don’t care what any other owner says. It was designed to restrict the Lakers and our marketability.”
That lockout was made to restrict the Lakers. It was.- Kobe Bryant
Bryant made sure to reiterate he meant the Lakers specifically, and not just other similar teams: “There is only one team like the Lakers. Everything that was done with that lockout was to restrict the Lakers’ ability to get players and to create a sense of parity, for the San Antonios of the world and the Sacramentos of the world.”
The lockout rant was sparked by a conversation about the Lakers’ championship hopes in the near future. While Los Angeles appears far away from title contention at the moment, Bryant doesn’t see it that way, saying he knows upper management is “hell-bent” on putting together a championship caliber roster as soon as next year.
Bryant noted the vetoed Chris Paul trade as a prime example of the Lakers being able to pull off big moves against the odds. The aging star thinks the front office will have something up its sleeve again:
But a funny thing happened, coming out of that lockout: Even with those restrictions, the Lakers pulled off a trade [for Chris Paul] that immediately set us up for a championship, a run of championships later, and which saved money. Now, the NBA vetoed that trade. But the Lakers pulled that shit off, and no one would have thought it was even possible. The trade got vetoed, because they’d just staged the whole lockout to restrict the Lakers. Mitch got penalized for being smart. But if we could do that...
Los Angeles will likely have another high draft pick and a ton of cap space this summer, so there’s a chance to make some rapid improvement. But will any big-time free agents want to come to the Lakers and play alongside this current version of Bryant, who will be coming off a third consecutive season-ending injury and has earned the reputation of being difficult to get along with?
Lakers Nation: Byron Scott talks the Lakers’ future and the coming summer.
That remains to be seen, but Bryant said that any player intimidated by the challenge of playing with him and bringing the Lakers back to respectability doesn’t belong in Los Angeles:
"Does my nature make me less enjoyable to play with? Of course," he says. "Of course it does. Is it possible that some top players in the league are intimidated by that? Yes. But do I want to play with those players? Does the Laker organization want those specific players? No. Magic. Jordan. Bird. We all would have been phenomenal teammates. This organization wants players who will carry this franchise to another five or six championships. The player who does that has to be cut from the same cloth. And if they're not cut from that cloth, they don't belong here."
Intriguing Kobe Quotes
Even when Bryant and the Lakers enjoyed immense success, there was tension in the organization due to the big personalities. Bryant infamously had beef with both head coach Phil Jackson and star center Shaquille O'Neal and Bryant admitted some of the shots he took from Jackson in the media grated on him:
Well, most successful people are a little arrogant.... I was very stubborn. I was like a wild horse that had the potential to become Secretariat, but who was just too fucking wild. So part of that was him trying to tame me. He’s also very intelligent, and he understood the dynamic he had to deal with between me and Shaq. So he would take shots at me in the press, and I understood he was doing that in order to ingratiate himself to Shaq. And since I knew what he was doing, I felt like that was an insult to my intelligence. I mean, I knew what he was doing. Why not just come to me and tell me that? Another thing was that I would go to him in confidence and talk about certain things, and he would then use those things to manipulate the media against me. And from that standpoint, I finally said, “No way. I’m not gonna deal with that anymore.” This was during our first run, during those first three championships. So when he’d come out in the press and say those things about me, I was finally like, “Fuck it. I’m done with this guy. I’ll play for him and win championships, but I will have no interaction with him.” Yet at the same time, it drove me at a maniacal pace. Because either consciously or unconsciously, he put a tremendous amount of pressure on me to be efficient, and to be great, and to be great now.
Bryant talked about his relationship with O’Neal as well, and while Bryant said the perception of the big man being lazy was true in certain years later in his career due to injuries, it wasn’t a problem during the championship years. And although there were times the two couldn’t stand each other, the relationship worked because they had no fear of each other and “challenged the shit out of each other.”
Finally, Bryant had some thoughts for the people who think he shoots too much:
“I’ve shot too much from the time I was eight years old,” Bryant says. “But ‘too much’ is a matter of perspective. Some people thought Mozart had too many notes in his compositions. Let me put it this way: I entertain people who say I shoot too much. I find it very interesting. Going back to Mozart, he responded to critics by saying there were neither too many notes or too few. There were as many as necessary.”
Kobe Bryant is Mozart. Shut it down.
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