Kobe Bryant has been in a very revealing and honest mood, divulging details about many different things throughout his career. One of the more recent tales is about he and Dwight Howard. When Dwight was traded to the Lakers there were numerous headlines about he and Bryant butting heads. The two clearly have different personalities where Dwight is the more playful, joking type and Kobe is more serious and focused on winning. Bryant admits that’s why they didn’t get along but they eventually got it together.
Bryant: “If you go back and look at the guys I’ve gotten along with, they’re all cut from the same cloth. All of them. Then you look at the guys I didn’t get along with, or might have had some ups and downs with and they’re not. It’s a consistent thing…and I’m fine with that. It’s okay.”
Q: “So then how do you deal with those guys who aren’t like you? It’s not like pick-up ball, where if you don’t like playing with a guy, you can just wait a game and get a new team.”
Bryant: “You’re right. Can’t do it.”
Q: “So what do you do?”
Bryant: “In the past, in my younger days, I’d just run all over them. I’d tell them to go sit down, or stand over in the corner, we’ll figure it out without you. Over the years, particularly starting in 2008 on, I started to understand more that we all have [that drive] in us, but those buttons haven’t been pushed yet. There’s something in that communication that you have to learn about that person, that can maybe trigger that focus and trigger that passion for those areas. Maybe they won’t be able to carry it for an entire season, but maybe you can trigger it for important stretches of the season. So it became more about, ‘We all have it, it’s my job as a leader of this team to figure out how to pull it out of everyone’…as opposed to going, ‘Oh it’s his dumbass fault! [laughs]”
Q: “Okay, so remember when Nate Robinson dunked over Dwight and I asked you about it and you said “No f—king way’ you’d ever let someone do that to you?”
Bryant: “I still wouldn’t have done it.”
Q: “But then Dwight comes to your team and everyone’s wondering, how that will work out…”
Bryant: “We figured it out. It goes to what I said before, if you look at the second half of that season, what we accomplished? Ri-dic-ulous. We were five games out of the playoffs going into the All-Star break. Dead water, in the west. But we managed to figure that s–t out and put ourselves in the No. 8 spot and unfortunately an injury happened but we were playing so well. Going into the end of the season, anything could have happened. So even though on the surface it didn’t work, [Dwight] figured a way to do what we needed him to do, and I figured out the best way to reach him.”
