[NBA] The 4-Point Play: Kobe Bryant the human ICBM

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Welcome back everyone. I decided to jump in on the Kobe Bryant debate because it seems like most of the fans I’m talking to, and many of the talking heads, are painting this latest explosion as more proof that Kobe Bryant is a selfish ball hog. To them I would say….maybe….and so what!!

Kobe Bryant: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

In case you have been living under a rock for the past day or so, Kobe Bryant put on a show last night the likes of which I have never seen in my life. He took every sort of shot you can imagine, he threw himself at defenders like drunken stuck bull, and he was a human blitzkrieg on his way to 81 points. Taking into account pace of the average game, and modern defenses I believe this is the most impressive scoring performance in history….yes even more impressive than Wilt’s 100.

What made this performance so interesting, and why I get upset when the talking heads and fans bash the performance, is that it was actually necessary for a pathetic Laker team to win the game. The team amounts to Kobe, the walking corpse that is Lamar Odom, and then cast offs and never-have-beens that litter the Lakers like a mange.

An intercontinental ballistic missile happens to be a very long range ballistic missile that is typically used to deliver nuclear war heads upon one’s enemies. There is seemingly no range which can not be hit (typically 3,500 miles) and it can deliver SEVERAL warheads on unknowing targets…depending on their own technological sophistication.

Those poor Raptors. You wanted to know why the dinosaurs died. I think I have an idea, and it revolved around a pathetic attempt to stop little SG’s from jacking them up in basketball games. The Raptors’ best player, Chris Bosh, sounded like a war veteran who had gone through some sort of shell-shocking:

“We were just watching him shoot. He takes the type of shots where you don’t think they’re going to go in, but suddenly he’s rolling, so he’s kind of hard to stop.”

The final phase of an ICBM is the re-entry phase. Coming in from a sub-orbital flight the bomb hits the Earth going at somewhere around 4KM/s, raining down terror upon the ground. For Kobe this happened sometime around the 3rd quarter when he scored 12 of the 55 he would put in….that half!

What were the rest of the Lakers doing? Watching. What else can be done?

I’m sick of hearing from fans and purists talking about what this does for “team” concept. I’m sick of hearing how awful this is and how you would never catch the ’85 Celtics doing that, or the ’34 Whoever-in-the-hells.

The fact of the matter is that the numbers show that this is the only way this team can win and it’s the only way this team can get even close to the playoffs. The fact that he’s doing it within the triangle (as much as it can be forced on the team with Kobe there) says a lot about the difference between last year and this.

The problem with the team is that it’s filled with players who can’t create their own shot and who aren’t consistent enough to produce enough to justify Kobe shooting much less. Smush Parker is maddeningly inconsistent. He’s reliable from 3, but he is horrible getting to the line and his skills appear best suited for spot up shooting. For him to be a more reliable shot than Kobe, on any given possession, he has to be wide open or Kobe has to be doubled. That is not a recipe for getting a ton of shots.

Chris Mihm is the big man version of Smush. When open he does a nice job of hitting the jumper from the elbow. His post up skills were never fantastic to begin with and in this offense the opportunity isn’t there to try them out much.. His best role seems to be receiving passes on dribble drives and can run a decent pick and roll with a player who can feed him the ball with aplomb. His issue is that he just isn’t athletic enough to improve on his numbers. Certainly he doesn’t deserve more shots. The added defensive attention would only hinder what he has accomplished so far. He’s getting about what he would even if some of Kobe’s shots went to other players….because at this point he’d be one of the last places they would go.

Lamar Odom could have a beef. His adjusted FG% is actually slightly higher than Kobe’s (50% as opposed to 49%), so you could make the case that giving Odom more shots wouldn’t hurt the team, and it would help the overall flow. The problem with that is that his FT% is horrid for a player of his reputation, talent, and SKILL. If both players drive the lane and get hit, Kobe will make 84% of his FT’s, Odom will underachieve to the level of 70%. Over the course of a season that’s not small peanuts. All things being equal it’s probably a better scoring proposition to have Kobe shooting any random particular shot as opposed to Odom.

What Kobe COULD do more often could be to draw more defensive attention and then pass to a singled up Odom. The issue here is that the triangle doesn’t making Kobe the main distributor….though it can be argued exactly how much the team sticks to that offensive philosophy. Simply put, I’m not altogether sure Odom’s best role in a motion offense is one of scoring. He is unusual in his passing ability for a big man and I wonder if his best role isn’t as a distributor. He CAN score well enough that teams must pay him attention, but at this level he lacks the explosion (like Mihm) and shooting touch to be a 20 point-per-game player. His best role is being a scoring THREAT to open up the court, while giving other high % guys attempts to score.

The problem is that Odom has some misconceptions about what he seems to be best at and what role he needs to fill on THIS particular team. And even then maybe that isn’t accurate. It’s REPORTED that he had grown upset with his role on the team, but his public stance has always been one of relative acceptance and happiness….so maybe he DOES get it.

The key here is that Kobe isn’t in the Iverson world of shooting 35%, while his team sits around wondering if the ball is coming this way. The Lakers DO have more movement than the Sixers and Kobe DOES dominate the ball less than Iverson. The key is that Kobe does enough from the floor and line to justify taking the shots that he does. Only if these antics disrupted offensive flow or if it took shots away from very good open teammates would this cause a problem in the amount of points the team scored. Right now, this is the only shot the team has of winning.

To vilify Kobe we’re going to need to see: another player step up and be so good that taking the ball away from them is horrible; Kobe start to decline to a point where it’s dumb for him to shoot; for the team to get another superstar on the level of a Kobe where sharing is simply the only intelligent thing to do.

Once these things happen we can see how Kobe reacts and judge him accordingly. Until then he is doing exactly what the team needs on the offensive end for them to win games.

His once solid defense…..that’s another matter for another article….

Atlas, Titan, Minuteman, Peacekeeper, Trident the United States currently has 11 forms of intercontinental ballistic missile. The NBA has one. I must say that I was very leery of the reputation and the player himself. However, at some point you have to let it go, turn on your TV, and watch this guy lay waste to defenses designed completely with stopping him in mind. To say his is blowing up right now is an understatement. But the simple fact is that for all his ball hogging he is doing what he needs to do to pull an inferior team into the playoffs.

If only blowing up his dog of a team was so easy.

Join me again won’t you….

I’ve said it a million times and I mean it this TIME:

Read Pat Nguyen
Read Pomazak
Read Rogers

I like them and I gauren-damn-tee you will too.