As we still soak in Michael Jordan’s relentlessness leadership from episodes 7 and 8 of ‘The Last Dance’, former Los Angeles Lakers guard Jeremy Lin brought to light a vintage Kobe moment.
One thing we know about Kobe is that he hated losing and the ’14-15 Lakers team was good at just that. They only won 21 games, with Bryant missing 47 games.
During a practice near the trade deadline, an injured Kobe showed up to talk to his teammates, but it wasn’t pleasant.
On the ‘Inside The Green Room” podcast with Danny Green and Harrison Sanford, Lin explained what happened.
“He comes in, sweatsuit [on], he has a sling around for his hurt shoulder, he has his shades on, his Kobe shades,” Lin recalls. “And he walks in and everyone’s like, ‘Ohhhh’ and Booz, Carlos Boozer, is like ‘Kob! Good to see you bro! Dang, we haven’t seen you in a bit, how come you came today?’ And he was just stone-faced, and he was like, ‘I just came by to say bye to some of you bums who are going to get traded tomorrow.’ [laughs] And then he sits down at the table where you control the scoreboard at the practice facility and he said a couple words to the coach, and then he left. And I remember one of my teammates was just like ‘I lost all motivation to practice.’”
Ironically, the Lakers didn’t make any trades that season.
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