By virtue of his standing in NBA history and the five NBA championship rings he can choose to wear on any given night, Kobe Bryant can say things his relatively young, less accomplished coach Mike Brown cannot.
“I’ve won so I can (tell people to shut up),” Bryant said. “For Mike it might be a little tough to say that so I’ll say it for him: ‘Everybody shut up. Let us work. At the end of the day, you’ll be happy with the result as you normally are.’ ”
Bryant said he’s been “amused” by the criticism of the Lakers’ new-look Princeton offense as the team got off to its second consecutive 0-2 start despite the offseason acquisitions of Steve Nash and Dwight Howard, comparing it to the team’s struggles to learn the Triangle offense when Jackson came to the team in 1999.
While there are important differences between the Princeton offense and the Triangle offense popularized by Jackson on his championship teams in Chicago and Los Angeles, Bryant said the philosophies are similar enough that he has great faith it is the right system to maximize the Lakers’ offensive potential.
“I don’t understand,” Bryant said with a smile when asked about the distress the Lakers’ poor start has created amongst the city. “And I’m trying to bite my tongue and not calling them ‘dumb,’ which I kind of just did.
“But they’ve seen us win multiple championships here in an offense that was tough to learn, that was a sequence of options that weren’t set plays, that took five guys getting on the same page and working together.
“They know how that stuff works, so for them to be so stupid now, for them to say, ‘Oh, let Steve dribble the ball around and create opportunities for everybody, or let Dwight post up or let me iso’ … It’s, I don’t want to say ‘idiotic,’ but it’s close.”
(STORY CONTINUES…)
WRITTEN BY Ramona Shelburne | ESPNLosAngeles.com & FULL STORY HERE
