Gotta admit, he's learned how to say the right thing these days. The team is harmonious, no more daily bickering, even if a guy calls for theball more (Gasol) it's received as well meaning and for the betterment of the team, not crying, this team just seems to be the complete opposite of theearly decade Lakers. And I wonder if it all comes down to the leadership part of it.
Originally Posted by Notorious 858
This is my desktop wallpaper right now:
[h1]Kobe Bryant rises above any rivalry[/h1]
Now to see just whose age this is . . .
As Little Kobe and Little LeBron, the muppets Nike calls its "MVP Puppets," announced in their latest commercial, in which they play "SportsCenter" anchors, the rivalry is back on!
And just in time for Christmas!
With ESPN and Nike as core NBA sponsors, what are the chances Little Kobe and Little LeBron become the first muppets to anchor a real "SportsCenter" between now and the Lakers' Christmas game against the Cavaliers?
Nike debuted the muppets last spring, alongside its "Dream Season 23 & 24" documentary, in which narrator Justin Timberlake mused:
"As these friends grow closer to a showdown, you have to wonder, what are they thinking?"
By the Finals, where Orlando represented the East after stunning the Cavaliers, James was thinking, "What happened to my showdown?"
Nike doesn't retrench or rebuild, it just reloads. The muppets are back in more cute spots, like the one in which Little LeBron notes his King James namesake lion "could step on the Black Mamba and eat it and use his skin for his boots."
Talk about brilliant. Not only was Nike spared months of talks trying to get the real Kobe and LeBron together, it didn't even need a real rivalry!
In the real world (assuming there still is one) there's no rivalry at this point, and barely a competition.
LeBron may be younger, hotter commercially and perhaps even the better player, but that doesn't count.
In the one and only thing that does, Kobe leads in titles, 4-0, and he's on a Lakers team that looks stronger than it did winning last spring's title.
LeBron's Cavaliers are No. 3 in the East and live in fear of losing him as a free agent this summer.
In today lemmings' rush to celebrate and/or condemn, winning can rescue anyone from anything, as it has with Bryant.
And losing can curse anyone for anything . . . as it has with Bryant. It's not fair, or smart, but it definitely is.
Being one of the Final Four means that within 25 days, you can go from accepting the MVP trophy from David Stern to being torched nationwide for not congratulating the team that beats you, like James last spring.
No one suffered as many slings and arrows as Bryant, who was this good for a long time, while being vilified, as his own 2005 Nike ad noted, mockingly:
"Ball hog . . . You're garbage . . . Prima donna . . . Mental."
By their last season together, Shaquille O'Neal had become Bryant's sidekick, as Kobe went to a new level while commuting back and forth to Colorado.
That one ended with the Lakers' loss to Detroit in the Finals, the trade of O'Neal . . . and the ostracism of Bryant for supposedly running off Shaq.
Two seasons later, Kobe awed his peers who had viewed him so skeptically, scoring 81 points in one game, 62 in another with two 50s and six 40s in a six-week, game-was-never-played-at-this-level burst.
That season ended with Bryant accused of "tanking" Game 7 of a first-round loss to Phoenix.
By the spring of 2007, seemingly cemented in mediocrity, Bryant turned on Lakers owner Jerry Buss, demanding to be traded.
Now, with a championship team having magically arisen around him, Kobe is Zeus.
After his running, banked three-pointer beat Miami, the New York Times' Larry #**+ wrote, "It was luck in much the same way that Picasso lucked into 'Guernica,' or Beethoven lucked into his Fifth Symphony."
There's a school of thought that anything an artist does is art, held, at least, by some artists.
This wasn't "Guernica," just blind luck, noted Bryant, who's anything but bashful.
No NBA career ever had Bryant's highs and lows, and he didn't escape unscathed. Even in his bulletproof days, he was wary of outsiders, cocooned within his family that moved here with him.
Years later he found out how bulletproof he really was in a firestorm of a scandal that burned him to the consistency of charcoal.
Young Kobe was serene, took offense at little and gave visiting writers rides to their hotels. Grownup Kobe is polite but edgy, as sensitive to perceived invasions of his privacy as the princess who felt the pea under 20 mattresses.
If you dreamed his dreams, won three NBA titles by 22 and saw it all go wrong; if you were torched in a sensational scandal; if you then emerged to find yourself chained to a team going nowhere; and if you had the incredible drive it took to get that far in the first place . . . then you'd know how Kobe Bryant feels.
As it is, there was never anyone like Bryant and only he knows what it feels like.
The child who rushed headlong into manhood and stardom with all its pitfalls learned a lot of things the hardest possible way, but these are the good times.
Everything he dreamed of is waiting for him to claim it. It's not a child's vision, like the destiny he says he realized at 6. It's his life.
As he, himself, has said of his four title runs, it's the quest that counts. No NBA player, star or scrub on a 10-day contract, ever had his sense of mission, but he doesn't get to keep going on crusades forever, or even for long.
"That's hard for me to address," said Jerry West, mentor to Young Kobe and icon in his own right, asked what he wants for Bryant.
"Even to this day, I'm scarred from losses. And I was nuts, OK?
"With him, I think he's like a great artist of some sort. No one can define what makes him great. You think you can but you can't. He's a genius. He's a genius in a pair of basketball shoes . . .
"I'm not sure he realizes how much people in this city and the young kids love him. I wish that he would some day find that out. And if he would, he probably would have a greater appreciation for who he really is.
"But I think he enjoys playing the game, but it's war to him, and he wants to win every war."
It's certainly not war, even if you can get hurt -- your feelings mostly -- and everyone around you has so much fun being consumed in a pretend war.
It's not even bigger than life. It's life and life only, just on the most spectacular level you can imagine.
Link:
http://www.latimes.com/sp...c20,0,380735,full.column
Originally Posted by CP1708
Only a couple more days til the end of Niketalk.
Hopefully they don't look past OKC, get that W, and then be ready. The next couple weeks have some HUGE statement type games.
Originally Posted by CP1708
Only a couple more days til the end of Niketalk.
Hopefully they don't look past OKC, get that W, and then be ready. The next couple weeks have some HUGE statement type games.
this.Originally Posted by CP1708
Only a couple more days til the end of Niketalk.
Hopefully they don't look past OKC, get that W, and then be ready. The next couple weeks have some HUGE statement type games.
Originally Posted by CP1708
It's ok, no matter what happens, even if we lose on Christmas, I'm ready for em.
I'm always ready for em.
Originally Posted by DTruth07
^
new wallpaper
[h2]With Kobe, everything is working[/h2]
By J.A. Adande
ESPN Los Angeles
It's not often that you get to write the words "Kobe Bryant" and "easy" in the same sentence. This is a man who has treated shots as though they were Olympic high dives with more points to be gained through degree of difficulty. You can't plug his name into the clichéd ghetto-to-gated-community plotline; his path travels from Philadelphia to Italy, and includes (technically) Charlotte, N.C., and (regrettably) Eagle, Colo. It would take a complex formula to determine the exact division of credit/blame between him and Shaquille O'Neal when it comes to their three championships together and their eventual, inevitable split.
Yet when it came time to think of an athlete to summarize the past decade in Los Angeles, an athlete to focus on for the launch of a Web site dedicated to this city's sports, the easy choice was Kobe Bryant.
Kobe made this really easy. And of all his accomplishments -- the four championships, the MVP trophies from the Finals, the scoring title, you name it -- getting to the point of simplicity might be his most remarkable. For the first time, watching Bryant requires no justifications or qualifications. There is no battle for control of the team, no court case hanging over the season, no trade demands issued. Isn't it amazing that as the expanding media sphere manufactures more celebrities and ensnares an increasing amount of them in its gossipy grip, the amount of controversy surrounding Bryant decreases?
We are finally free to simply observe him as a basketball player, one who continues to evolve, pushing himself and the game to its limits. He gave the most insightful look yet at his inner machinery earlier this season when he said, "I just can't stop. [There's] not something that motivates me. It's just how I am." It's that simple. And that powerful.
The latest refinement to his game has produced a scorer who is more effective than ever. Now he succeeds on precision instead of sheer volume. He has shifted his office space to below the free throw line, entering the post, playing with his back to the basket and attempting to score by falling away from his opponents rather than trying to soar over them. The result is he's making more than 48 percent of his shots for the first time in his career.
He also has passed up shots he would have taken in the past. His previous operating philosophy was that any shot he took had to be better than whatever his teammates could attempt, even if it meant heaving the ball at the hoop with his left hand while his right arm was hanging like a wet sock because he'd just injured his shoulder. Now, he'll get into the lane and forsake his own scoring opportunity if he believes there's a better option elsewhere. The irony is that his assists average was higher in the early seasons of the decade, when he was considered more selfish. These days, he's willing to take a secondary role on more plays, passing the ball to someone else and letting him set up the score.
The only thing Kobe could do before that he can't do now is win the dunk contest, as he did in his rookie season. Today, he wouldn't even beat out teammate Shannon Brown. Bryant will admit that even in his best years he couldn't jump higher than Brown. Part of winning wars is recognizing which battles are worth fighting.
Michael Jordan once said the quality Bryant possessed that reminded him most of himself was the desire to distance himself from contemporaries. For Jordan, it started off with Clyde Drexler, then advanced to Magic Johnson once he became the obstacle to winning a championship and gaining acclaim as the greatest in the league.
Bryant constantly forces his way into that classic sports argument -- who's better? -- right on through his current sparring partner, LeBron James. (There's far from a consensus, but I'll pass along the observations of one longtime scout: "For me, it's Kobe, and it's not even close.") James needs to win championships (plural) before the comparison is really valid. Eventually, he could overtake Bryant. If not LeBron, then Carmelo Anthony or Dwyane Wade or perhaps someone we don't even suspect yet.
It's testament enough to Kobe that he's even in the discussion after 13 seasons in the league. He has worn out the previous arguments, including Kobe vs. Grant Hill, Kobe vs. Penny Hardaway, Kobe vs. Vince Carter and Kobe vs. Tracy McGrady.
But more importantly, he prevailed over that part of himself that seemed to have a pathological need for drama, that savvy infant side that knew a well-timed outburst could upstage the NBA Finals, the All-Star Game or any other event whenever the focus had shifted from him. He no longer veers to the extremes of either excessive shots or conspicuous passivity. Last season was notable not only for the team's championship but for the lack of controversy involving Bryant.
Some will never be able to forget his past transgressions. He's certainly given his critics more ammo than Rambo. He can make it hard for his fans to defend him (or even represent him, after he changed jersey numbers). But isn't the essence of Los Angeles to judge people on what they are about right now? It's a place where you get to reinvent yourself, as many times as you like.
Our first memories of Kobe, the excitable teenager who seemed to place entertainment value over effectiveness, the one Shaq dubbed "Showboat," are as outdated as the "Oops! ... I Did It Again" version of Britney Spears. He's gone from patterning himself after Michael Jordan to learning firsthand from Hakeem Olajuwon, just as Magic Johnson once went from mimicking Oscar Robertson to adapting Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's hook shot. Jump shots below the free throw line but outside of the lane now make up 29 percent of Kobe's shots, up from 23 percent last season.
Bryant has stayed at the top of the game specifically because of his desire to change. For a while he veered in the direction of believing he could do everything by himself. All that ever got him was frustration and first-round playoff exits. He had to acquiesce. The season that brought him his greatest post-Shaq triumph coincided with his lowest scoring average since Shaq left.
It isn't always easy to acknowledge your shortcomings, or even recognize your own athletic mortality. But Kobe could feel the lift departing his legs before we could see it, so by the time we realized he couldn't outjump people anymore he already adapted his game to compensate for it.
Now he values real estate over airspace. If you're in the right position, you're halfway there. Bryant has become adept at selecting his spot, going to it and rising up to shoot, with the defender helpless to do anything about it. Or watch him lurking around the basket, cashing in opportunistic rebounds for easy putback shots.
Bryant has always had a voracious appetite for the ball (teammates and coaches speak with simultaneous disapproval and awe at the way Bryant can rush to the rock and demand it), but as his understanding of positioning and anticipation has grown the ball now finds him, the same way the puck always seemed to make its way to Mario Lemieux's stick.
If Norma Desmond clinging to her past in "Sunset Boulevard" is the ultimate Hollywood sad story, Bryant has been the exact opposite. By abandoning his old personas he has become more relevant than ever.
As much as the sports landscape is his, he also belongs to Los Angeles. Any remaining doubt was eliminated during baseball's National League Championship Series, when the Dodgers played his hometown Philadelphia Phillies and Kobe showed up, sat next to Frank McCourt and Tommy Lasorda, donned a Dodgers cap and threw up an "L.A." sign when he was shown on DiamondVision.
The reason Kobe formed such a bond with this city is that he represents its most unappreciated trait: hard work. Far below the Hollywood sign, Los Angeles is a place of predawn call times on the set, of hard labor at the port, of manual labor and legal wrangling. And the constant in Kobe's career has been his effort.
It didn't matter if you were happy to see him win a championship without Shaq or upset that he had been rewarded after plunging the franchise into three years of upheaval just to satisfy his curiosity. There's no denying that it wasn't simply bestowed on him. He earned this most recent ring and everything that came with it, including the adulation from the humongous crowd at the Coliseum championship rally and the shout-outs from Lil Wayne and Kanye West, who performed at the Lakers' private party.
Kobe Bryant put in the work, he reached the top.
Sometimes the story really is that easy.
Link:
http://sports.espn.go.com...adande_ja&id=4758265
Originally Posted by Notorious 858
Any NT Laker fans going to the Christmas day game ?
I heard they're handing out the the new NIKE MVP puppets foam finger at Staples Center:
Originally Posted by Menacin Methods
Originally Posted by DTruth07
^
new wallpaper
1) Magic
2) Kareem
3) Kobe
I think ariza was ranked 29th and Pau 14th
