Thursday, June 12, 2008

Maybe Maxwell Smart Will Loan Him The "Cone Of Silence" Before Tonight's Game 4.


From ESPN's Bill Simmons:

Q: What has been the funniest subplot of the Finals so far?

A: Curt Schilling's colorful blog post about sitting next to the Lakers' bench for Game 2. My three favorite things about this one:

1. You have to love the year 2008, when baseball players blog about their experiences at NBA games. I don't know how we got here, but it's fantastic.

2. The Kobe anecdotes are so damning you have to read them to fully grasp the significance. All I can say is I sat close to the court for Games 1 and 2 and can confirm everything -- the glares, the yelling, the extended staring, the poisonous body language and everything else. If this had been pickup hoops, some of Kobe's teammates would have intentionally thrown a game just to get back to the sidelines, then done the "No, I'm running with these four guys" routine when he came over to ask if they wanted "Next" with him.

3. It has been hysterical to watch the city of Los Angeles rush to Kobe's defense by ripping Schilling -- as evidenced by this T.J. Simers column Wednesday (JackRabbit Café's Editor's Note: Simers is the only L.A. writer who calls Bryant on his bullshit) -- instead of coming to grips with the fact the last five months of hunky-dory, "Good Ship Lollipop" Lakers stories was Hollywood's biggest B.S. story of the year other than everyone in the Writer's Guild pretending they liked how the strike turned out. Kobe is a wonderful basketball player. We all concede this point. Just don't keep trying to sell us on the fact he's a good teammate. We have a decade's worth of evidence that says otherwise. When the going gets tough, he goes into "me mode" and it's way too late for him to change. Sorry.

No need to be sorry, Bill. Anybody paying attention already knows Kobe's "character".

 
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