Kobe Bryant had a career filled with some incredible highs with the Los Angeles Lakers. He won multiple championships, Finals MVPs, scoring titles, and a lot more during his 20 seasons with the team. His accomplishments have led to Kobe being regarded as the greatest Laker ever, and he certainly has a very strong argument for it.
His time with them didn’t get off to the best of starts, however. Bryant, who came into the NBA straight out of high school in 1996, was a raw teenager when he joined the Lakers, and he wasn’t getting a lot of playing time for a team that would go on to win 56 games that season. Come playoff time, however, Kobe suddenly found himself thrust into the spotlight against the Utah Jazz in the Western Conference Semifinals.
Kobe Bryant Says He Changed His Training Regimen After He Shot 4 Airballs Against The Utah Jazz
The Lakers were down 3-1 entering Game 5 against Utah, and things weren’t looking good for them at all. Veteran Byron Scott was already out for the game, and then during it, Robert Horry was ejected while Shaquille O’Neal fouled out with 1:46 remaining in the 4th quarter. The Lakers needed someone to step up, and the young Kobe took it upon himself to do just that, but things went horribly wrong. He first missed a game-winner with an airball and then proceeded to shoot three more airballs in overtime, as the Lakers lost 98-93. A sequence like that would break a lot of young players, but not Kobe, who was built differently. Bryant was once asked about that sequence and whether it helped him develop his Mamba mentality.
“In a sense, yeah. See, but before those airballs, the mentality was already there because I had the cojones to shoot them and not only did I feel like I had the cojones to shoot them, I felt like I should be the one to shoot them. That was just my logic and reasoning right, and then I failed miserably. And then after that when I get back home I’m like ‘Well, am I not clutch? What the hell happened.'”
“So I started looking at, well, why were those shots short? Started breaking things down, I started looking at what I was doing in my physical training aspect, what was I doing? I’m coming from a season where I played 35 games max and I’m going to a season where I’m playing 110-115 games. What am I doing? All the shots felt good, they felt on line, just didn’t reach the basket and that’s when I said okay I’m gonna start changing my training regimen and do a lot of weight training throughout the course of the year to get stronger as the year progresses. So that’s how I was able to kind of think through that process and use it as an opportunity to grow as a player.”
He learned from that failure by analyzing what went wrong and went on to become one of the most clutch players in NBA history. Some growing pains are inevitable for everybody and what separates the greats from the rest is how they look to get better from them instead of crumbling.
Kobe also spoke about his idol Michael Jordan during this appearance as he was asked the question that a lot of people still ask to this day, is he better than MJ? Bryant said he wasn’t, stating that he will never say he is better than Michael, as he learned so much from him, which makes it a non-conversation.
