5 days ago
Shane Battier on preparing to try to guard Kobe Bryant
Shane Battier on preparing to try to guard Kobe Bryant
One of the reasons the late great Kobe Bryant was one of the greatest players in NBA history was his immense and seemingly limitless skills on offense. Perhaps there was no greater one-on-one player in the history of the sport, and he had an incredible array of moves, shots and fakes, not to mention incredible footwork, that he used to reduce defenders to rubble.
One player who had some success guarding him was forward Shane Battier. But like just about anyone else, Battier often got handled by Bryant.
He made an appearance on "Pable Torre Finds Out" on Thursday and talked about trying to guard the "Black Mamba," something he called "scary."
'I played against the greatest players of my generation, and I miss that anxiety. Guarding Kobe Bryant is [expletive] scary. I never will forget the feeling of getting on the bus at the Marina Del Rey Ritz—it's a 45 minute ride to the Staples Center—and I'm just thinking to myself, '[expletive], this guy is trying to embarrass me. ... He wants to score 80 points on me tonight.'
'That anxiety was real. I call it productive paranoia. Instead of being paralyzing, I used that to be like, man, I better know everything about Kobe that there is to know about him. I tried to learn, I threw myself into data analytics and just learned Kobe better than Kobe knew himself. It allowed me to stay in the game. I understood, okay, I'm not going to stop these guys, but I can be a human yellow light, and slow them down a little bit. That was my only goal — just be the human yellow light.'
Battier got his chance to guard Bryant for an extended amount of time during the 2009 Western Conference semifinals when his Houston Rockets took on the Los Angeles Lakers. He didn't exactly do badly -- Bryant shot above 45% in just three of the seven games of the series, and he twice shot under 40%.
Battier tried to put a hand in Bryant's face so that the latter couldn't see the basket. It seemed to work at times, but it didn't work well enough, as the Lakers prevailed in seven games and went on to win their fourth NBA championship of the Bryant era.
The legendary guard simply wouldn't let anyone give him the yellow or red light — at least not for an extended amount of time.
