Kobe Longs For Rivalry

http://bostonherald.com/sports/celtics_nba/boston_celtics/2014/01/kobe_bryant_longs_for_rivalry


Kobe Bryant longs for rivalry
Hurt star reminisces on C’s-Lakers battles





BLAST FROM THE PAST: Tonight’s Celtics-Lakers game at the Garden won’t look like past meetings, with Kobe Bryant injured and Paul Pierce now playing in Brooklyn.

Friday, January 17, 2014
By:  Steve Bulpett



EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — Were you upset last June when the Celtics traded Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett to Brooklyn? Even though you knew the day was coming eventually, did you shed a basketball tear at the end of the era and loss of a longshot last hurrah?

Well, you had company. Across the continent, Kobe Bryant felt your pain — and some of his own.

“Absolutely,” he said recently after a Lakers practice that went on without him and his fractured left knee. “It was tough to see that happen. I mean, going against Paul and KG, Lakers-Celtics? That’s good basketball.”

Bryant shook his head and hit the memory button on his mind’s DVR.

“When we played against them, you saw really good basketball,” Kobe said. “You saw smart players, unselfish players who played both ends of the floor, multi-faceted players.

“So of course I’d hoped for a team like that to stick together, because that’s the maximum level of competition that you’re going to have. I mean, that 2010 series is my favorite series of all time, just because it was the most competitive one. It was the most difficult one. I mean, we’re going against four future Hall of Famers. That doesn’t happen too often.”

Having lost the 2008 Finals to the Celtics in six games and come back to win in seven two years later, Bryant smiled and admitted he’d harbored the hope that the two fabled franchises could thread the NBA needle and meet in the rubber match this spring.

He laughed long and hard when it was suggested that such a series might resemble Sylvester Stallone and Robert DeNiro starring in “Grudge Match.”

“Yeah,” Kobe said, “but in boxing it looks a little bit different than it does in a team sport. In a team sport, you can hide a little bit more. But, of course. As a competitor, you want to be able to see that and face them.”

Sitting on a hallway table at the Lakers’ practice facility, Bryant then chose to unburden himself of a deep, dark secret. Despite being sidelined, he talked of making the road trip with the Lakers and, in particular, tonight’s Garden stop. His voice lowered to just above a whisper. Kobe was serious, and Kobe was smiling.

“I love it,” he said. “I love going into Boston. I love playing there. I mean, the fans are incredible, because, you know, they’re nasty, but they appreciate the game. They appreciate good basketball. They appreciate players who go out there and just leave it all on the court. You know, friend or foe, they have an appreciation for it.

“I’m really looking forward to it. I’m going to interact a little bit with the crowd, absolutely. I’ll have a chance to kind of look around and look at the numbers in the rafters and kind of appreciate it a little bit more. Absolutely, because when you play, you know, you’ve got your blinders on. You’ve got tunnel vision. This will be good.”

If you’re slightly stunned at Bryant’s affection for a place that, at least outwardly, appears to hold so little of it for him, that’s certainly fair. Kobe’s a little surprised, as well. He once again recounted his 1996 pre-draft visit to Boston, putting on Celtics gear and working out with then-assistant coach Dennis Johnson.

“Oh, man,” Bryant said, “I didn’t want to go, because I was such a Lakers fan. And then I went and I had the best time. I had the best time. I was like, these guys aren’t that bad. D.J.’s actually a really great guy, and it’s not as bad as I thought playing on a green floor.”

When he became a Laker, he didn’t get the Boston-LA lecture from his elders.

“Not really,” Kobe said. “They didn’t have to. It was more like I had questions for them because I was such a big fan. None of them really felt the need to explain to me what was going on because just in the conversations that we had they could automatically tell that I knew my history and I was a big fan. I was more the one asking them questions, and Byron (Scott) would tell me all the old stories about playing in the old Boston Garden. But those guys were hanging around all the time anyway. I’d see James (Worthy). I’d see Cap (captain Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and Kurt (Rambis) and (assistant coach) Bill Bertka, so everybody was around.”

Bryant may have known all about the rivalry, but he finally got to drink it in.

“In 2008, that was it,” he said. “Prior to that, Boston had some struggles. Like when we played them there, it seemed like there were more Laker fans than Celtic fans. But in ’08, that’s when everything turned and it was a palpable sense in the city about the Celtics and the Lakers. You could feel it.

“It’s a personal thing. Even though now Bird and Magic are all good friends and off the court the rivalry is kind of put behind, on the court, I mean, that’s still there. When you think about how many championships we cost them during that era and how many championships they’ve cost the Lakers, there’s got to be some tension there. The way I look at it, they cost me my sixth one. I should be sitting here with six.”

The fact Kobe Bryant was sitting while his mates went through practice is another issue. At 35, does he really need this anymore? As he pushes himself through a second rehab in less than a year (the knee fracture came six games after his return from a torn Achilles tendon), what, really, does he have to prove?

“It’s coming back from this injury,” he said. “Father time eventually will win, but now it’s a matter of keeping him at bay for several more years while everybody else is thinking that this is it for me — that this is the time and it’s over. That’s the challenge, trying to figure out how to solve the puzzle of the human body, the aging human body.”

And Bostonians may well be on his side in this battle. As with Pierce and KG, they don’t want to see Kobe go. It wouldn’t be as much fun without him.



bob
MY NOTE:  The greatness of our two franchises were built upon the titanic battles of our rivalry.  As Magic Johnson said at his HOF induction "If there was no Larry Bird, there'd be no Magic Johnson".  I just hope that Kobe is still around when both of our teams are back at it again, hammer-and-tong.


.

I recall Abdul-Jabbar telling laker fans at some ceremony to honor him that he had just come back from Boston and that the Celtics "miss us."

A sportswriter once said that Larry Bird was in the locker room by himself hours before a Laker game humming and singing and totally blissed out anticipating the coming game.

The best want a worthy adversary.

Great memories and hopefully a harbinger for the future tonight!

Sam

Just a few pre-draft photos...



KJ

damn as much as I hated him all these years why the fock didn't we draft him? was that the year we drafted Billups and Ron Mercer, now I hate Pittino even more.....dumb ass fockin ego maniac!!!

bob the greatness of the whole league is because of these 2 historic franchises.....if only Perk never got hurt in game 6. If only we got KG a few years earlier, if only AB and Jeff Green never missed the playoffs and whole season that year in 12, we had Miami's number.....that team should have won 3 titles, their defense was that good and they were that talented.

cow,

i think Boston took 'toine over him.




KJ

I heard that the Celtics were going to draft Kobe but the entire female population of Boston banded together to procure an injunction against it.

Sam

That draft went like this:

PHI Allen Iverson Georgetown University 914 37584 24368 3394 5624 .425 .313 .780 41.1 26.7 3.7 6.2 99.0 .126
2 TOR Marcus Camby University of Massachusetts Amherst 973 28684 9262 9513 1837 .466 .205 .670 29.5 9.5 9.8 1.9 81.6 .137
3 VAN Shareef Abdur-Rahim University of California 830 28882 15028 6239 2109 .472 .297 .810 34.8 18.1 7.5 2.5 71.2 .118
4 MIL Stephon Marbury Georgia Institute of Technology 846 31891 16297 2516 6471 .433 .325 .784 37.7 19.3 3.0 7.6 77.5 .117
5 MIN Ray Allen University of Connecticut 1262 45310 24130 5163 4296 .452 .400 .894 35.9 19.1 4.1 3.4 142.7 .151
6 BOS Antoine Walker University of Kentucky 893 31531 15647 6891 3170 .414 .325 .633 35.3 17.5 7.7 3.5 38.1 .058
7 LAC Lorenzen Wright University of Memphis 778 18535 6191 4943 622 .459 .069 .645 23.8 8.0 6.4 0.8 30.5 .079
8 NJN Kerry Kittles Villanova University 507 16929 7165 1983 1295 .439 .378 .780 33.4 14.1 3.9 2.6 44.8 .127
9 DAL Samaki Walker University of Louisville 445 7612 2376 2089 252 .462 .111 .630 17.1 5.3 4.7 0.6 14.2 .089
10 IND Erick Dampier Mississippi State University 987 24003 7309 7005 817 .498 .125 .626 24.3 7.4 7.1 0.8 52.7 .105
11 GSW Todd Fuller North Carolina State University 225 2500 835 674 46 .422 .000 .668 11.1 3.7 3.0 0.2 2.2 .041
12 CLE Vitaly Potapenko Wright State University 610 11608 3995 2725 418 .479 .167 .694 19.0 6.5 4.5 0.7 15.5 .064
13 CHH Kobe Bryant

Charlotte took Kobe in a draft deal with the Lakers  then traded him immediately for Vlade Divacs.

It's seems amazing today that Potapenko (Ukraine Train, we hardly knew ye), Todd Fuller, Eric Dampier, Samaki Walker, Kerry Kittles and Lorenzen Wright were all taken ahead of Kobe. Picks one through six are defensible. 'Toine, for instance, was seen as a rare talent: a guy who could rebound and bring the ball up like a point guard. Some even compared him to Magic. But six through twelve?

Granted, Kobe was a high school kid but those guys?

Jerry West was a great GM.