Kobe Bryant has fans in Larry Bird and Kendrick Perkins for very different reasons, but they all lead to the same place. Kobe is about winning and doesn't care about much else.
Kobe Bryant scored 28 points in a Lakers loss to the Philadelphia 76ers this week, pushing himself to fifth on the NBA career scoring list, past his former partner in hoops, Shaquille O'Neal who ranked there with 28,596 points.
Ahead of Bryant are only Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Wilt, Karl Malone and MJ. Shaq, now a TNT basketball analyst tweeted his congratulations which seemed sincere. O'Neal also called Kobe the greatest Laker ever. Quite a turnaround from the days they butted heads and went their separate ways.
Larry Legend, a/k/a Larry Bird picked Kobe over LeBron James as the player he'd rather have on his team were he magically back in the NBA.
"If you want to have fun, like I did with Bill Walton, play with LeBron. It would have probably been more fun to play with LeBron, but if you want to win and win and win, it's Kobe. Not that LeBron's not a winner, just that [Kobe's] mindset is to go into every practice, every game, to get better."
Bryant was flattered when he heard about Bird's comments because of the admiration the Black Mamba has for Bird as a player and a champion.
Another former Celtic, center Kendrick Perkins now on the Oklahoma City Thunder complimented Kobe in the same sentence as he took a shot at LeBron James. James lauded Blake Griffin for his dunk over Perkins that made the "instant classic" ranks on basketball highlight reels.
Perkins castigated James for taking time to tweet about a dunk.
"You don’t see Kobe [Bryant] tweeting,” Perkins said. “You don’t see Michael Jordan tweeting. If you’re an elite player, plays like that don’t excite you. At the end of the day, the guys who are playing for the right reasons who are trying to win championships are not worrying about one play."
Shaquille O'Neal's renaissance of love for Bryant can be viewed as a convenience for him as a likable television personality, but Bird and Perkins have no need to praise him. There is no payoff for them.
Kobe is usually a figure of scorn for his arrest record, his aloof manner and his purported lack of trust in his teammates. This week the attributes that make people dislike him, came in handy.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
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#1 false, kobe doesnt care about
false, kobe doesnt care about WINNING he cares more about his STATS ,most importantly the total points record ,if he cared about WINNING , he wouldnt shoot so much get the bigs involved , and not have shot the lakers out of games this year ,notably the 76ers game where he went 1 for 10 in the 4th ,that game bynum had a 20 20 game .