New Lakers head coach Byron Scott has said that he will monitor the amount of stress put on Kobe Bryant in training camp and throughout the grind of the 82 game regular season, per Brett Pollakoff of ProBasktballTalk.com. Bryant is coming off of a season in which he only played 6 games before fracturing a bone in his knee.
Now you’ve known Kobe Bryant since he was a teenager, since he first got to the league. You were on the first team he played on with the Lakers. When it comes to Kobe Bryant, he’s been in the league a long time, a lot of miles on those wheels. How are you going to get him to relax? To just sit down once in a while?
Yeah, Kobe’s his own man. We know how hard he works, we know how driven he is. But I think he’s at the point too where he’s so much more mature, and he understands that he only has a few more miles left on that body, you know, maybe two, maybe three years. And I think he’s probably more acceptable to accept the fact that you can’t practice every day. There might be some games where you can’t play this game or that game. But that’s all to be determined. We have to sit down before training camp and go over some things because I can’t have him going twice a day in training camp. That’s what the young guys are supposed to do. He’s been here long enough and understands his game better than anybody here, what it takes to win. I got to use that knowledge that he has as well. I’m going to treat him like he’s an assistant coach as well as a player.
The 36 year old Kobe Bryant will be heading into his 19th NBA season, and it is wise for head coach Byron Scott to take the pressure off of the strong willed Kobe to put the team on his back. This Greg Popovich-like approach should benefit Kobe in the long-run.