Faced with the possibility of staying with his lifelong team surrounded by unfamiliar players, or jumping to other team with more unfamiliar players but in the same building, Kobe Bryant chose the former, re-upping with the Lakers for 7 years and $134 million. Then again, the possibility remains that Bryant could end up playing with even more unfamiliar teammates, in the Colorado Prison Intramural League.
Kobe may have had better teammates had he crossed over to the other locker room- but he decided, wisely, that since the Clips are the most sorry, no account franchise in all of sports, he’d rather spend his career as the signature player in an historically great organization than in an historically awful one.
Now if you’ve been following “what’s going on with Kobe” but don’t know the Lakers from the Clippers, there’s other news from yesterday, which may have some impact the first news: the videotape of an interrogation of Bryant by investigators after he was arrested last June has been declared admissible in court. And according to one of the “legal experts" interviewed by O'Reilly on Fox News tonight, the interrogation includes Bryant discussing the sexual habits of several other NBA players- including Shaquille O’Neal. Oops.
Were this true, might it shed a bit of light on the whole Shaq/Kobe feud of the past three years? Funny- in all those hours of pontification about the situation in the last four weeks, I’ve never heard Stephen A. Smith mention this once.
Posted by Stephen Silver at July 16, 2004 01:42 AM