I was nervous to include this on the high-minded intelligent blog, but it serves a purpose. If you want to be a sports writer, news writer or an effective PR writer you have to practice everything. I put it up on my blog and thought….why wouldn’t responding not be a good practice for the Ronin click?
==============================================
This will either be Kobe Bryant’s greatest success or his most complete failure. This is the career defining moment. This is either the time where the daredevil jumps too far and falls on the hard concrete suddenly human, or jumps just far enough and embraces immortality. Either way, Kobe has brought LA 5 rings. He is the Laker chief, and with him the tribe must ride or die.
Mike Brown is a great coach; time will tell if we are allowed to say that in a year (as of this posting, Mike Brown was terminated as the Lakers’ coach). But you don’t get this much talent on your team and then coach them to mediocrity (let alone this complete failure going on right now) and get excuses. This is it. Mike Brown’s junior high B team will not trust his advice if this is a bust.
The truth is that the Princeton Offense is really difficult to learn. And the truth is no matter how difficult it is, if it doesn’t guarantee winning it might not be worth throwing this season away. People may look back on this and wonder why, and who, and what made the Lakers sabotage the end of Kobe and Nash’s career with an experiment that didn’t need to be done. Truth is a training camp should have been enough to come out looking strong, efficient and concentrating on nothing more than making it better…instead they don’t know who’s taking the ball out.
And let’s admit that the Lakers psyche is not John Wooden’s pyramid. If Kobe is known for his determination, then the Lakers’ psyche has become excuses. A profound ability to never realize that the patterns you create in training camp become how you build the season, and this becomes where you end up in the playoffs. They say the season doesn’t really start in LA until the playoffs, and then it actually starts in the second round, and now every year we act surprised that we didn’t have the mind-set to turn the screws.
And that’s why the NBA is becoming a league of Rockets, Oklahomans, Heaters and creaking Celtics ignoring the pain and forcing another round. If your pattern is excuses for why tomorrow is not built off of today, welcome to the garden where the seeds of your discontent were planted.
Kobe is right though, we all need to just shut up. But the questions sitting in the silence like an 800 pound gorilla will only get louder. Why did Kobe pick the most difficult offense the year after the excuse was: “we didn’t have a full training camp”?
Fine! Experiment with the most difficult offense. But if it does not accentuate the strengths of the other players on the team, then who cares and why try in the first place?
It’s like watching Houdini in the shark tank. No one knows how this will end. Will we watch one of the greatest artists of the craft go limp in front of us? Or will we see Kobe become the next phase of greatness. The force that guided the Lakers back to the ring. I don’t know. I see the Nash interview and can’t believe how sick and tired he looks. After game 1.
And yes I think we might look back and see that a coach with little credibility was out of his element and let Kobe go too far.
But still I believe in our basketball Houdini. If Kobe says shut up and wait; we do. But the silence will either be a silence that erupts into a war cry of ball player supremacy, or the Titanic crashing live across ESPN
What happens this season will decide Los Angeles’ sports alliances and identity for many years to come. We’ll see who we really are. But Kobe has earned the right to be trusted. But some of us can’t forget the summer of Bynum and trade demands. Kobe said he was done playing GM, he might need to quit coaching too. But this year we all die in battle, or slay the league together. And there is no greater player than Kobe to somehow break free and finish going from the worst to the greatest.
- stress test
Ronin Literati 