“Yeah, they could do it – because they’re good”, Bryant said afterward. “We’ve been playing like s***”.
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Bryant scored four points and managed to make just 1-of-14 shots to tie the worst shooting night of his 20-year career.
The hip-hop mogul continued, “I think that father time caught up with him”.
“I haven’t thought about reducing his role”, Scott said Wednesday at the team’s practice facility. And then you have to have health…But they have the players to do (break the winning streak and defend their title). “I don’t think it’s a matter of him being exhausted, or his legs behind exhausted, I think it’s just a matter of his timing being a little off”. What, I don’t know, because there’s no way of putting those teams together and seeing who really would be the best. I’ve got to look at this one on film. He had the layup that he missed as well. They worked themselves through that, and what you see now is a team that’s been through the wars.
Bryant has not said when he is officially retiring, but earlier this summer, Lakers part-owner and executive vice president of basketball operations Jim Buss told the Los Angeles Times that the team expects this season to be Bryant’s last of his career. “It’s very tough to hit at 37”.
Watching Bryant lumber up and down the court, demand the ball, and force up a jump shot – only to brick it – is extremely hard to watch, especially considering a younger Kobe would have made that same jumper and left a younger me wondering “how do you stop this guy”? Tonight was just very frustrating.
Even with Bryant’s sadsack display, he offered something that no one else could on this night in which the Warriors waltzed so anticlimactically into the league’s annals: a reminder that what the Warriors are doing at the moment is extremely rare stuff. Even growing up a Warriors fan, that’s the kind of respect I had – and still have – for Bryant, and I’m sure others in my generation feel the same way.
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He also continues to mismanage minutes of an aging Bryant, and fails to develop the team’s young talents in D’Angelo Russell and Julius Randle.
