Pro-Lakers Kobe in Philly

December 21st, 2007, 3:47 pm · Post a Comment · posted by KEVIN DING, OCREGISTER.COM

PHILADELPHIA — Kobe Bryant was relaxed again before the game here in his childhood hometown, just as he was amid the media swarm in Chicago over that having been his once-possible future destination. (Bryant was pretty relaxed before the game in between these in Cleveland, too: He gave Andrew Bynum, who was lockering next to Bryant, all kinds of smack for the very small shorts Bynum was wearing.)

Here are some of Bryant’s very pro-Lakers comments from Philly:

“I think we’re doing extremely well. We’ve made the progression now to being a solid team, a team that plays consistently well. Even when you have bad games, you still have an opportunity to win the game (as the Lakers did in Cleveland). … That’s a solid team. So now we’ve got to make the progression from being a solid team to jumping up to that elite level, and that’s the hardest step of them all.”
“We have guys here with a blue-collar mentality and want to put forth the work, and when you have that you’ll get there eventually.”
“If you want to get to that championship level, you can’t skip steps. So as a result we have to stay in the present, stay in the moment and take each day as it comes and work at that. We haven’t had any problem adopting that philosophy.”
“We have great chemistry amongst ourselves. I think the turning point was I went up to the guys (before the season opener) and talked to them a little about the business side of the game. The business side of basketball a lot of times can really mess things up, because I wasn’t the only player being talked about in trade discussions. Lamar (Odom) had been talked about in trade discussions, along with some other players. So it was important for them to understand you have to be able to separate the business from the game and still come out and give maximum effort. Focus on doing what you have to do as a professional to move along for us, for this team and for our coaches and for what we need to do. Once we were able to make that separation, it was very easy from that point forward to just focus on each other and what we have to do to get better as a team.”

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