![]() He showed Kobe a few examples of questionable shots and pointed out his teammates standing around and watching him on some drives to the basket. "He knew he had to do it."Ĭoach K pulled out a laptop and sat with Bryant in a room. "Coach was nervous," says one of his staffers. ![]() The next morning, before leaving Shanghai, Krzyzewski asked Bryant, a three-time NBA champion with the Lakers, for a private meeting. This time they talked only about how to handle Kobe. The coaching staff met through the night. Krzyzewski told LeBron that he would talk to Kobe and asked that he trust him. The Redeem Team was supposed to be all about accountability, and this was James holding Coach K and Bryant accountable. Players can police themselves, but in this instance, as LeBron was coming out of the game, he said to Mike, 'Yo, Coach, you'd better fix that motherf-,' as he walks by. "They know when another player is being selfish. "Everyone knew it," says one Team USA staffer. The Americans were eager to get on with the Olympic tournament, and Kobe, apparently bored, seemed to be increasing the degree of difficulty on some attempts. won 87–76 but looked exceedingly beatable in doing so. He took a few loose shots in the second half against Australia-enough to draw the attention of his teammates. 5, 2008, Bryant wasn't meeting Team USA's. But standards are standards, and suddenly on the night of Aug. He had been a pro for 10 years and appreciated the fact that Coach K was motivating him in a way that had nothing to do with money. ![]() Over time, Kobe felt reinvigorated by the unique challenge before him. "It looked kind of weird," says McMillan. In that first team meeting in Las Vegas, Bryant sat at a table by himself, removed from his teammates, right behind the coaching staff. A lot of players were surprised that Kobe accepted the invitation to play for Team USA, given his standing around the league as a lone wolf. ![]() In Ian O'Connor's recently-released book, " Coach K: The Rise and Reign of Mike Krzyzewski," a tense in-game moment is detailed in which LeBron, coming off the court, voiced his strong displeasure with Kobe's shot selection to Krzyzewski, who had been tabbed to coach the Olympic team and was reportedly treading lightly in his transition from coaching college kids - whom he could command with total authority - to the best grown-men players in the world.īryant, for one, enjoyed how Krzyzewski coached him. ![]() This clash of basketball ethos apparently came to a head in the lead-up to the Olympics. Kobe thought score first, and second, and sometimes third. LeBron has always operated as part of a team. What made the LeBron-Kobe union so interesting, and potentially so flammable, was the dichotomy between their styles of play. left the 2004 Olympics in Greece with an embarrassing bronze medal. That's when LeBron and Kobe joined forces as the alphas of USA Basketball, anchoring the "Redeem Team" that was assembled to set the global-basketball-supremacy record straight after the U.S. By the time James got to the Western Conference, it was to replace the retired Bryant as the star of the Lakers.īut their legacies circled one another as probably the world's two best players for at least a half decade, and 2008 was right in the middle of that period. One of the great NBA disappointments is that we never got to see LeBron James and Kobe Bryant face off in a playoff series. ![]()
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