New Season Thread Made, Move on Over :)

How do you guys deal with idiot trolls.. (if youve been in the offseason thread you know).

The stuff that gets said gets me mad :lol
 
When it comes to trolls try not to react and definitely dont get angry...thats what trolls thrive on, pissing people off to receive attention so once you get all pissed off its game over...youve given them exactly what they wanted.

Try and look at them with pity, its sad some of the sht these dudes post to get attention from the interwebz.
 
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MJsaver said:
Yong Kobe was raw but wow you can still see so much of the same player that hes become today, footwork, athleticism, ball handling, and shooting were all there at such a young age. Even a sprinkle of defense and a classic bad kobe shot or two :lol.
D Fish yoked it on somebody though :eek, jeez that was unexpected.
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I thought this was a good read from Ball Don't Lie.

For whatever reason, several of the league's more entertaining players have fallen off in recent years. Be it due to injury, confidence issues, rotation frustrations, a poor fit, or general ennui in a profession that can get tiresome, these players have disappointed of late. For the next few weeks, we're going to take a look at a list of familiar names that haven't produced familiar games over the last few years. Or, at least players that have produced games that we don't want to be in the habit of familiarizing ourselves with.

Today, we're looking at Los Angeles Lakers legend Kobe Bryant.

This might be a column, oh-so-touchy Laker fans, that you might have to actually read instead of just glomming on to the title and moving on to the comment section.

This isn't some dour bent begging the great Kobe Bryant to return to the sort of play that saw him top off an afternoon in a pizzeria with an 81-point game. The guy is 34, now, and while we fully expect a normal NBA season to aid him in kicking that field-goal percentage up a notch in his 17th season, age has set in and we don't blame Kobe one bit for the expected slight tail off.

[Related: Kobe's 81-point game was fueled by pepperoni pizza]

What we "want back" from Kobe has little to do with on-court production, or bottom-line scouting. He's going to give us those numbers no matter what, even if Bryant goes for stretches as the fourth option in an offense featuring Steve Nash, Pau Gasol and Dwight Howard. No, what we "want back" from Kobe is the barely-beer-buying-legal spark that told him it was cool to ring up then-Chicago Bulls assistant coach Tex Winter during the NBA's previous lockout year in 1999. The one that had him reaching out to someone over three times his age just to chat about how the triangle offense worked.

This was before Phil Jackson took over as coach of the Lakers, a move that would rescue Winter from his role working under Tim Floyd on a rebuilding Bulls team. Bryant was sick of the unimaginative strong side-heavy offense ex-coach Del Harris employed, and presumably not impressed with whatever the heck Kurt Rambis ran, and probably wanted to know more about Winter's triangle offense; an offense that had been in place for six of the last eight NBA champions. Following Winter's move to Los Angeles, that offense would be the foundation for five more over the next decade. Good spacing and in-the-moment play-calling, it turns out, is pretty hard to counter.

Especially, as the triangle offense's detractors will tell you, when you have a group of superstars working within that spacing and in-the-moment play-calling. It's a read and react offense, sure, but it helps when you have a cast and crew of future Hall of Famers reading and reacting.

So, what do we have here?

A point guard for the ages. The NBA's most versatile big man. The best center this league will see from 2007 until at least a decade after. Kobe Bean Bryant, still a thing.

[Related: Lakers center was the only one without a number at the NBA's rookie photo shoot]

What we "want back" is Kobe doing something with this thing. Even if the triangle is junked, and the less complicated but similarly principled Princeton offense is put into place.

To discredit Bryant a little bit, it's important to point out that by his second season working under the triangle, he was already ticking off both Jackson and Winter by straying away from what they were asking him to do. Watch clips of old Chicago Bull or Los Angeles Lakers games, and you can see that Michael Jordan committed far more intensely to Winter's offense than Bryant despite MJ's consistent cracks about its limitations. It's not as if Bryant was a triangle disciple.

That's not what we're after, though.

That was a kid, that Kobe, even some six and seven years after Winter came to Los Angeles. The man is 34, now, and should be smart and confident enough to figure out his role in what could be something special. We'd just like a bit of that mini-fro era wonder as he heads into a season that has a chance to be, in terms of team-wide dominance, his finest ever.

Bryant is going to be typically fantastic this year. His age and lack of lift during the Olympic tournament was a little worrying, but over an 82-game haul he'll be allowed time off between games and plenty of help from a Lakers training staff that knows exactly what Kobe needs. Even if he presses, and continues to attempt to dominate the offense with Steve Nash out there and Pau Gasol as a potentially deadly threat within the Princeton offense, the Lakers should be considered championship favorites even in spite of the team's iffy depth and age.

[Related: Eduardo Najera becomes the first Mexican head coach under the NBA umbrella]

We'd just like them, with Bryant leading the way, to be championship favorites for a different reason. Championship favorites because Kobe got weird with it, and stepped out of his comfort zone. Because he took a chance, even in his mid-30s, and didn't rely on that endless series of up-fakes to get his shot off. Showing the same scary mixture of humility and confidence that only a 21-year-old ringzzzz-less kid can boast while he calls up a six-time NBA champion currently working for another team to pick his brain about the nuances of an offense that veterans in their mid-30s often can't be bothered with.

That dude, that kid, is still in there. The Lakers don't need it to come back, and the still-brilliant Bryant doesn't need him to come back, but it would be pretty marvelous to see the old dog try some new tricks.

You know Kobe has it in him. We're incredibly excited to see what comes out of Bryant, and his Lakers, if he comes back./QUOTE]
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Lakers to Honor Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with Statue Outside Staples Center
Written by Ryan Ward on 08/27/2012 in News - 1 Comment
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A fourth bronze statue commemorating another member of the Los Angeles Lakers organization is officially in the works with the storied NBA franchise deciding that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar will be the next in line to greet Lakers fans in front of the Staples Center according to Mark Medina of the L.A. Times:

“The Lakers are to unveil a statue featuring Hall of Fame center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at some point during the 2012-13 season, The Times has learned.

“A firm date for introducing the statue outside Staples Center hasn’t been finalized.”

Although Abdul-Jabbar was already a star and an NBA champion before heading to Los Angeles from the Milwaukee Bucks in 1975, the Hall of Famer really began to flourish as one of the greatest players of all-time while playing alongside Magic Johnson as a member of the Showtime Lakers.

During his 14 years in Los Angeles, Abdul-Jabbar helped lead the Lakers to five NBA titles while winning NBA MVP honors three more times. Perhaps Kareem’s greatest accomplishment that has yet to be eclipsed is becoming the league’s all-time leading scorer with 38,387 points. Kobe Bryant currently sits at fifth all-time in that category and the closest active player to passing Kareem.

After finally calling it a career in 1989, Abdul-Jabbar had put together one of the most impressive resumes in NBA history. The Hall of Fame center finished with six NBA titles, six NBA MVP awards, two NBA Finals MVPs and 19 All-Star appearances.

Needless to say, the man formerly known as Lew Alcindor is arguably one of the most successful NBA players in league history with a legacy that will never be forgotten in the city of Los Angeles from his years with the Lakers and playing for John Wooden at UCLA.

As well as dominating the game at the professional level, Alcindor destroyed the competition as Wooden’s greatest pupil with three championships on the collegiate level before being drafted by the Bucks in 1969.

Abdul-Jabbar continued to the tradition of great Lakers centers following in the footsteps of George Mikan and paving the way for Shaquille O’Neal and the newly acquired Dwight Howard.

The Lakers legend will be the fourth in the line of Lakers greats with Chick Hearn, Jerry West and Magic Johnson coming before him. Two other legendary Los Angeles athletes have also been immortalized in bronze outside Staples Center in the form of boxer Oscar De La Hoya and perhaps the greatest hockey player in the history of the sport in Wayne Gretzky of the Los Angeles Kings.
 
MoonMan818 said:
FrenchBlue23 said:
The only thing Kareem doesn't deserve is to be out there among Oscar De La Hoya
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Seriously.. why the **** does he have a statue outside staples
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because he has scored the most points in the leaguebecause he is the best center to ever play because he is KAREEM
 
"Kobe called that a month before it happened," Durant told Yahoo! Sports while promoting his new movie "Thunderstruck."

"I didn't believe him. He was just like, 'We are going to have Dwight. We are going to have Steve Nash.' He just talks a lot of trash, jokes and laughs. But he said it. I don't think anyone paid attention to it but me and him. He said it and it happened. And they got better, a lot better.
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lol at kobe.
 
ACBboyz84 said:
Rare Kobe rookie year 1996 summer league game. Although he was only 17. You can tell he was a superstar in the making.:smokin :x

:eek Fisher hop at 5:28 8o

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goodness gracious Kobe has hated the suns since forever!! dudes game was so far past everyone else its crazy.

damn this makes me want to watch old summer league games now....anybody have A.I's from that same year? or lebrons and d.wades?
 
I'm a big fan of Zach Lowe's work, so I figured I share this:
How will Kobe Bryant mesh with the Lakers’ revamped roster?

The Lakers have been the most popular topic of discussion during these NBA dog days, with countless writers (including this one) wondering how all these new and exciting parts will fit together in the Princeton offense. The biggest sub-questions have focused, as always, on Kobe Bryant. Will he share the ball? Will he be content to work away from the ball? Will he sabotage the Lakers by hogging the ball, rendering Steve Nash as a glorified James Jones?

Those are all fair questions. And even if Kobe “fails” at each of them, the Lakers should still have a top-five offense simply by virtue of their talent on the floor. L.A. ranked 10th in the league in points per possession last season, and its upgrades at center and point guard — the latter being one of the two positions that opposing defenses barely guarded last year — should be enough to kick the Lakers up a few spots without any stylistic changes. If the worst-case scenario happens, and Bryant relegates Nash to spot-up duty, having arguably the greatest shooter in league history in Ramon Sessions’ place should be worth a few points per game.

But that alone won’t make the Lakers title favorites — not with the Thunder going through the same self-discovery process that the Heat went through last season, and not with questions about Dwight Howard’s back and the general age of the core players. A Lakers team that doesn’t meet something close to its full potential will have a difficult time winning the title. The difference between truly approaching that potential and missing it by a larger margin comes down to thousands of little decisions that take place across 100 or so games, all of which add up to form a team’s ultimate identity and balance. Those decisions might crystallize in one particularly memorable stretch — say, Bryant shooting the Lakers out of Game 4 against the Thunder — but their outcome will be visible even if no such flashbulb moment happens.

Bryant will be at the center of a lot of those choices, as plenty of scribes — including Sebastian Pruiti, Anthony Macri, Henry Abbott, Beckley Mason and I, among others — have already noted. All of us have been fretting, to some degree, about Bryant’s willingness to play nice within a new ecosystem that will feature the Princeton offense, an elite point guard and a pick-and-roll beast of a center. The concern is justified. But in all of this collective anxiety, we’ve sort of buried a very basic fact about Kobe Bryant: He is a fantastic off-ball cutter.


Bryant is renowned for both his work ethic and his basketball intelligence. If you asked 100 players to name the smartest “basketball” guy in the league, I’d wager Kobe would finish among the top three or four vote-getters. (Nash would certainly give him a run.) Bryant’s footwork in the post is legend. That same nimble footwork, plus a heady sense of anticipation and space, makes Bryant a genius off-ball player when he wants to be.

That isn’t breaking news, I realize; any wing who plays the majority of his NBA career in the triangle offense should be very good at moving without the ball. But Bryant continued to flash that same genius last season under Mike Brown, who built several set pieces in his allegedly ho-hum offense around Bryant’s ability to work away from the ball. Bryant got some of his very best looks — both in the post and at the rim — off well-designed, quick-hitting cuts that gave him the chance to catch-and-shoot at close range, or to catch, take one dribble and create an easy look.

A lot of those plays started with Bryant in the corner and the Lakers’ two big men at the elbows. Sessions or Steve Blake would enter the ball to one of those big men, cut between them and set a screen for Bryant near the corner. At the same time, the big man at the elbow on Bryant’s side of the floor would prepare a screen, so that Kobe would have two picks from which to choose. In the still below, Sessions is in the paint, primed to set a pick for Bryant in the left corner, as Pau Gasol holds the ball up top and Bynum prepares a pick at the left elbow:

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Bryant torches defenders with cuts in this set. He loves to deke his guy by faking a cut toward Bynum and then cutting back-door along the baseline, where Gasol can hit him for an easy bucket. If Bryant chooses to take the Bynum screen, he can catch right above Bynum — almost running an impromptu pick-and-roll with him — or continue to loop around into the paint for a clean mid-range catch-and-shoot opportunity. He also likes to slither right in between the picks for an even closer mid-range catch-and-shoot.

And that’s just one type of effective Bryant cut. The Lakers sometimes have their two bigs set a mammoth double-staggered screen for him, like the one below, providing Bryant with all sorts of choices:

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Kobe is also great at spinning on the block for high-low lobs from Gasol, and he is a very good screener in a variety of situations: pick-and-rolls up top with Sessions, pick-and-rolls near the block with Gasol and standard cross-screens under the basket with Bynum.

All of this stuff can work within the Lakers’ hybrid Princeton system, since every Bryant cut and screen flows into follow-up cuts and screens all over the floor. At it’s core, that’s what the Princeton system is all about: constant screening and movement to space the floor and create open shots.

Bryant has all the tools to thrive in any motion-based system, and that’s what makes his tendency to halt motion prematurely so frustrating. Sometimes defenses will keep up with all those fancy screens and cuts designed to get Kobe open. Sometimes Kobe’s defender will fight through that action, force Kobe to catch the ball 18 feet from the basket and stand right in his face when Kobe makes that catch.

And that is the moment where all those little decisions that will determine the Lakers’ ceiling focus completely on Bryant. Watch the tape of Bryant’s post-ups and isolations from last season (which I did on a loop via Synergy Sports), and you’ll see hundreds of possessions that start with promising off-ball movement and end with Bryant launching a horrific 18-foot jumper with a hand in his face.

Correction: You have to be a careful about labeling all of those possessions “horrific,” for lots of reasons. The most obvious is the shot clock, an NBA reality too often ignored in micro-analysis of what happens during a possession. If Bryant makes that initial catch with five seconds left on the shot clock, the Lakers are nearly out of time for him to pursue an easy alternative.

But there are plenty of possessions — literally hundreds — in which Kobe makes that catch on the wing with 11 or 12 seconds remaining on the clock, holds the ball long enough for you to roll pasta around your fork without missing anything, and then finally goes to work. And on those possessions, there is very little stylistic difference between the Lakers — the high-powered, superstar-laden Lakers — and the Kings, which have any number of dead possessions throughout a game. The movement stops, with the other four Los Angeles players bunching on the other side of the floor, moving their defenders out of help position and readying for offensive rebounds.

And again: Not all of those shots are bad. Bryant is bigger and stronger than a lot of his defenders (and certainly smarter), and he can destroy people one-on-one. And Bryant’s holding the ball gives him time to survey defenses — to see how they overload on him and whether an opening might emerge elsewhere on the floor. Bryant ranked among the 46 most efficient players in the league, in terms of points per possession, on both isolation plays and post-ups last season, per Synergy. He’s a genius at both.

But a lot of those plays, especially the isolation attacks, have a lower general efficiency than catch-and-shoot chances, shots off cuts and other spot-up looks. Even an efficient isolation player costs his team slices of points in the long run by overdoing the one-on-one stuff at the expense of better actions, particularly when the shot clock allows for those actions. Toss away enough slices, and you’re down 3-2 to Oklahoma City.

This isn’t on Kobe alone. With Nash and Howard, a more mobile player than Bynum, Bryant will have better and perhaps more trustworthy (in his view) players to whom he can pass the ball when there are seven seconds left on the shot clock and someone becomes open. A lot of those empty post-ups that came after promising initial cuts ended up looking like this, with a Lakers’ point guard wide open in Bryant’s field of vision:

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Others featured those same point guards cutting to the rim, or someone like Jordan Hill flashing to the baseline. Will Bryant trust Nash, Howard and Antawn Jamison more than he trusted the group in L.A. last season? He kicked the ball out to his point guards in situations like the one pictured above a lot, but the most common result was a quick pass back to Kobe in the post for the same tough one-on-one shot. What might Nash do with identical kick-out opportunities?

Roster context is everything in the NBA. The Lakers’ have a new roster context, one that demands tiny day-by-day refinements from Bryant. He has the tools to make all of those adjustments, and to make them at the right times and in the right amounts. If he’s really one of the league’s smartest players, he’ll do the job.
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Link
 
Respect I already know if Nash made amare into a star...D12 will be a bball God running the pick n roll and Kobe gonna be Kobe as usual Mamba! :hat
 
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