We all know that Kobe Bryant doesn’t hold his tongue. He speaks his mind and wanted to set the record straight about what’s happening with Dwight Howard and the Lakers. We’ve heard this before, but the Black Mamba wanted to clarify. Is there drama? Are there issues? Has he been calling Dwight Howard out?
Did you see the pic we posted yesterday?! I want to believe him, but I just don’t think he’d put the team on blast. Check out what he had to say & let us know what you think…
Kobe Bryant doesn’t get what all the fuss was about.
If Bryant wanted to call out Dwight Howard for resting his injured shoulder for three games last week despite being medically cleared to play, he would’ve just done so. Instead, Bryant claimed his call for “urgency” was misinterpreted as a call-out and turned into a “manufactured conflict.”
“I didn’t say anything wrong. I didn’t say anything to hammer him over the head or take a run at him,” Bryant said before the Los Angeles Lakers’ practice Monday. “That was actually manufactured. I’d own up to it if I took a run at somebody.
“Urgency is something we’ve been trumpeting, we’ve been beating that drum since the beginning of the season when we started struggling.”
The comments Bryant is referring to came from an interview he gave to ESPNBoston.com’s Jackie MacMullan before the Lakers played the Boston Celtics last Thursday. Howard had sat out the previous three games, and the Lakers had just learned they would be without injured forwardPau Gasol for at least six to eight weeks.
“We don’t have time for [Howard’s shoulder] to heal,” Bryant told MacMullan. “We need some urgency. [Howard] has never been in a position where someone is driving him as hard as I am, as hard as this organization is.
“It’s win a championship or everything is a complete failure. That’s just how we [the Lakers] do it. And that’s foreign to him.”
Bryant did not say the quotes in the story were taken out of context. Rather, he took issue with the controversy that spiraled from them and the perception of a rift between himself and Howard.
He said that he reached out to Howard to make sure he understood it wasn’t his intention to call him out.
Bryant has been with the Lakers for 17 seasons and has grown somewhat immune to the noise generated by Los Angeles’ media. But even when he hears it, Bryant said he’s learned it doesn’t have to be a negative thing.
“It actually helped us keep our edge, keep our intensity,” Bryant said of the controversy that always hovered over his championship runs with Shaquille O’Neal. “It gave us something to kind of build towards. But like I said, there was actual conflict though.
“At least the Shaq stuff was actually warranted. This is just comical.”
