Kobe Bryant and ESPN have had quite an interesting couple of weeks dealing with each other. After ESPN ranked Kobe the 40th best player in the league, Bryant responded by calling the company a bunch of idiots. Since then, ESPN has escalated the war of words. First an article was released that said Bryant wasn’t really much of an NBA player at this point in his career, followed up by a scathing report basically blaming Kobe for all of the Lakers woes. The situation got pretty personal, pretty quickly.
So there was plenty of anticipation from folks who wanted to hear how Kobe would respond to the recent shots fired his way. Those expecting the increasingly-blunt Bryant to come out guns blazing were surely disappointed by his more diplomatic, shrug-it-off answers.
“It’s not the first one and it won’t be the last one,” Bryant said following the Lakers’ 114-108 preseason overtime loss to the Phoenix Suns on Tuesday. “One thing I’ve come to understand over the years is that you’ll have a bad story that comes out on a Monday and it seems like it’s the end of the world and it seems like everybody’s taking shots at you. But time goes by and then you look back on it and it was just a Monday.
“Then you have another great story that comes out maybe a month later, or something like that, and it’s a fantastic story. And then there’s a bad story that comes out one month after that. So you understand that it’s a cycle, and things are never as good or as bad as they seem in the moment in time.”
It looks like the war of words between the five-time champ and ESPN is over for now. With the NBA season less than a week away, it’s time to focus on some real basketball and what Bryant and his Lakers can do on the court.