Sports - Los Angeles Lakers #27: B/C Kobe and Gasol will hit you like 1, 2; like gold and silver

NessaBruin · 08-23-2008, 03:16 PM

Welcome to the Los Angeles Lakers Appreciation Thread!

The Los Angeles Lakers

From the George Mikan-led Minneapolis Lakers teams of the '40s and '50s to the "Showtime" era Magic Johnson teams of the late 1980s to
Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant's dynasty of the early 21st century, one thing has been consistent about the Lakers: winning. The franchise
has boasted a host of Hall of Famers and has compiled a string of championships which has scarcely been rivaled in the history of American sports.

the links

the fans

lakers0604 (sheila)
kingjames23 (cristina)
nessabruin (nessa)
miSStakentriSh (trisha)
lysee (rinaye)
BrucasForever<3
peanut99 (aimee)

what are your hopes for next season?

What do I hope for next season. An obvious championship, and I’m sure it will come. We are going to have Kobe, Pau, Lamar, Fish and Bynum starting and it shall be amazing! Not to mention I believe our bench will only get better. I see major growth in Jordan and Sasha because they both want to be out there, on the floor, you can see it in their eyes and they will work hard for it. This season will keep the injuries to a minimum because if we’re aiming for that trophy, we can’t have that. We’re gonna start off the season amazingly and 08-09 will be the year of the Lake.
nessa.

What are my expectations for next year? With the season we had this year I don't anything could happen next year that would surprise us. We have potential, something we've known all along. And now we just need to live up to that potential again, and to the fullest. I'm expecting us to get to the NBA Finals and win. I know that may be a lot to ask for, but we all know we have the potential to do it. This year we made the Finals and NO ONE even saw that coming. Next year we'll come back ever better! We're getting over all our injuries. People tend to forget we were really injured during the finals. Kobe with his finger and back, DFish with his tendon, Pau with his ankle, Sasha with his ankle. Quite a list, but we're getting over the injuries. Also we're getting Andrew Bynum back and with him we will have the best front court in the NBA. The Lakers are a force to be reckoned with again. We will not rest the till trophy is back where it belongs, in LA! Not with the Clippers but with the Lakers.
sheila.

I want this squad to continue their exciting basketball, I want them to get better and live up to their potential. There’s going to be a lot of expectations of them this year, especially after what happened in the last season, and without a doubt, they won’t disappoint. They know what it takes to get through the playoffs, they know the pressure, they have the heart and they have the will. They have an amazing opportunity to bring the title back to Southern California, and bring glory back to Los Angeles. It’s more than just a hope, though. This dream is inevitable.
trisha.

fan fiction

locked in
by nessa

Jordan didn’t know what had possessed him to do such a thing, perhaps seeing the pain in his eyes and knowing he was the cause of it or maybe seeing him for the first time as an actual human being but one thing he did know was that he liked the feeling of Sasha’s lips under his and Sasha must be enjoying it too because he was responding back with the same amount of passion.

Sasha was in heaven or he thought this is what it must feel like to be in heaven. So many times he wondered what it would be like to taste Jordan’s lips, reality was so much better than what he had imagined. Sasha’s hands creeped in under Jordan’s shirt, rubbing circles on his bare skin, causing Jordan to shiver.

five times the lakers went out to dinner together
by trisha

They do this - have dinner together - every few weeks. It was just something they started doing on their nine-game road trip back in February, and somehow it carried over the entire year. It was never planned. But it was always Sasha Vujacic who asked. “You free tonight, Pau? How about you, Kobe? Derek? Jordy? Luke? Ronny?” And he’d go around the practice facility, asking all fourteen guys. That was the easy part. It always came down to a vote as to where they were going to eat. They would narrow it down to three restaurants, and hope there was a winner by the time the votes were all counted up.

stay
by nessa

Sasha put his hands on Kobe’s head and their foreheads were touching, ‘Kobe what’s best for me is to be with you, playing with you, out there on the court every night. You taught me how to be better and for that I am eternally grateful,’ he then looked up a bit to lock eyes with him right before his lips crashed on Kobe’s.

whispers in the night
by trisha

Sasha tells him everything.

Like how he had a girlfriend back home in Slovenia. She was a nice girl, he said. The kind of girl a guy would want to take home to meet his parents. Though, when he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a basketball career, things just ended. She stopped calling after every game. And then, he slowly forgot how she looked - how she sounded, even. She became a part of his past, as he moved on with his future.

what they say

lakers keep LA footloose
by bill plaschke

Comebacks and collapses, Kobe Bryant banging greatness or buying dinner, Sasha Vujacic's stalk and Pau Gasol's stork, Jordan Farmar's cockiness and Derek Fisher's calm.

And each of them, every night, talking to Lamar Odom as if he were a skittish child at the end of his first long car ride, stay calm, stay focused, we're almost there, just one more game, just one more. With each little triumph, these Lakers gesture and scream and pop their jerseys as if they just won a state high school championship. With each failure, they acknowledge and accept their mistakes as if they were just cut from the junior varsity.

It's fun, it's unpredictable, it's real.

it all adds up to a Lakers season no one figured on
by bill plaschke

Who would have believed it? Who could have believed any of it?

When Lamar Odom began the season, he looked clunky and confused.

On Tuesday, he fought and flew, didn't miss any of his five shots or five free throws, looked as if he actually belonged.

When Jordan Farmar began this season, he was still a questionable first-round draft pick.

On Tuesday, his running three-pointer at the end of the first half summarized a year of bells and whistles and surprise.

When Derek Fisher began the season, he was just another former Laker brought home for a final long shot at glory.

On Tuesday, he stepped confidently on the court as the quiet locker-room leader who sank that shot.

When Pau Gasol began the season . . . well, by now you get the point.

kobe has more than chants to be MVP
by bill plaschke

They followed him to a great start with the emergence of Bynum. They followed him to a great recovery with the acquisition of Pau Gasol.

They are following him now even though he's playing with a torn ligament in his pinkie finger that aches with every dribble and every slap.

They're following him, but, for once, they're not trailing behind him.

They're following alongside him, as he directs them on defense, finds them open on offense, energizes them, embraces them.

download soundtrack

icons and arts

miSStakentriSh · 08-23-2008, 03:19 PM

thanks for the new thread, N. and love the title!

Quote:

Kobe turns a year older, a decade wiser
By Adrian Wojnarowski, Yahoo! Sports 4 hours, 36 minutes ago

BEIJING – Once Kobe Bryant let that Shaq rap go, he wished that he had resisted responding to so much else throughout his tumultuous 20s. Shaquille O’Neal obliterated him on that June nightclub stage in New York, a TMZ moment that threatened to drag Bryant back into that Hollywood trash-tabloid place.

Here was Bryant on his 30th birthday, on the eve of playing Spain for his gold-medal moment for United States basketball, and he had such regret that it took so long in his life to let Shaq shadow box.

“The biggest mistake I made was coming up with a rebuttal,” Bryant said. “My philosophy had always been to keep quiet and not to say anything. And by me responding, that drew me into it. If I had to do it over again, I would’ve just let people talk and say what they had to say, and as time goes on, they would’ve seen what was what.

“When you’re young, (you think) ‘Enough is enough. I’m going to say something.’ And all of a sudden…”

All of a sudden, there’s no winning. There’s no way out. Perhaps this is why Bryant seems so liberated, freed from a legacy and life forever framed through the prism of Shaq and their three Los Angeles Lakers’ titles together. As Kobe reshapes his image here with American flags, Jordanesque ferocity and the warm, welcoming touch of a grateful guest, O’Neal is back in the United States facing a restraining order for allegations of stalking an Atlanta woman after several disturbing e-mails and phone threats surfaced.

The old images of the brooding, immature Kobe and the gregarious, life-of-the-championship-party Shaq have turned inside out. Somehow, Kobe’s become the grownup and Shaq the screw-up.

In the wake of the Lakers’ NBA Finals loss to the Boston Celtics, Shaq climbed on that stage and started with the lyrics that, “Kobe couldn’t do without me,” and maybe for the first time cast Bryant as a sympathetic figure. To dismiss the firestorm as deftly as Bryant did – whatever, I’ve got a gold medal to win this summer – cornered Shaq as a fading superstar filled with too much jealousy, too little motivation.

These Olympics have been the most remarkable three weeks of Kobe Bryant’s basketball life. He disdains the marketing “Redeem Team” title, calling it “kind of cheesy” because let’s face it: Those weren’t his international failures over the past eight years. Nike tried so hard to make LeBron James a co-star of these Games but failed miserably. He’s riding shotgun and doesn’t seem terribly thrilled about it. There’s no usurping Bryant in China.

Bryant has won the respect of his teammates, but he doesn’t run in the big cliques on the team. LeBron is the ringleader of the young players, and Kobe goes his own way. He’s won his teammates over with his ferocity, his insatiable need to win, but no one ever gets close to Bryant. He’s a loner, but he learned to lead. When all hell was breaking loose in the semifinal victory over Argentina, it was Bryant working with Jason Kidd to bring his teammates back from the brink of losing composure.

“We didn’t come to tussle,” Bryant said. “We came to win a gold medal.”

When his teammates went in groups to volleyball and women’s basketball games this week, Bryant was over at the U.S.-Brazil gold medal women’s soccer match with his wife and daughters. He waves his American flag, his eyes mesmerized by the dichotomy between the winners and losers, gold and silver.

“I stayed to watch them get their gold medals, just to see what that would be like,” he said.

As much as any NBA player, these Olympics have been a source of pure fascination for Bryant. For this most obsessive perfectionist, a basketball player with a full-time staff “whose whole job, whole purpose, is to just stay on top of my health,” Bryant couldn’t stop putting his own greatness into context with that of the world’s best athletes. He spent several years of his childhood living in Italy and always did have a global perspective on himself. The Olympics have been such a renaissance to his career, Bryant insists that he wants to play as a 34-year-old in 2012 in London.

“If they want me back, I’ll be back,” he said.

Bryant’s popularity is staggering in Asia and Europe, and he insists that, “People here have seen my personality more than in the States. I’ve done tours here. In the season, I’m in that Mamba mode. That switch is on. But during the summer, I’m kicking back and they get to see what a smart-ass I am. They get a chance to relate to you a lot more.

“Half the places you go to in the States, they’re rooting against you. Here, I think they’ve seen more of who I am.”

Well, there’s this idea, too. Bryant will forever have the rape charges in Eagle, Colo., on his permanent stateside record, but they don’t judge him overseas. They don’t care about that dropped case and taking sides in the Lakers’ soap operas and vitriol toward his Lakers bosses and teammates.

They just judge Kobe in the pure way that he judges himself: On the basketball court, peerless.

On his way back home, Bryant will be remembered as the anchor responsible for restoring American basketball glory. His MVP season, his return to the Finals, taught Bryant that he had to give more of himself to get the things that he ultimately wanted.

For the longest time, though, he played the part of the spoiled brat, the baby brother that Shaq had to balance between shaping and scolding, and maybe ultimately defining. Now, Shaq’s career is in sharp decline with a summer of high-comedy, low-rent rap and a stalker complaint in hot pursuit.

Across the world, Bryant goes for his gold medal on Saturday, something it turns out he could do without Shaq. Still, that’s a war Bryant never won and never will. Mostly, he understands that it isn’t even worth waging. Let it go, he tells himself. Let it go.

“As I get older, I do care what people think of me,” Bryant said. “I don’t want them to have the wrong impression. That is important to me. I’m not too big to say that. I’m not embarrassed to say that.

“I care about what people think.”

The world has watched him grow from teenage prodigy to tortured twentysomething to the weekend a world away in China when Kobe Bryant could feel the burdens peeling away like a second skin.

“I’m just happy I made it to 30,” he said. “Now the pressure’s off.”

peanut99 · 08-23-2008, 03:20 PM

tftnt

NessaBruin · 08-23-2008, 03:24 PM

no prob guys!

that article is

miSStakentriSh · 08-23-2008, 03:30 PM

seven and a half hours!11!!

NessaBruin · 08-23-2008, 03:33 PM

gah!!!!

so excited, i think i'l be at the party looking at the time on my cell

peanut99 · 08-23-2008, 03:38 PM

awww, that article!

miSStakentriSh · 08-23-2008, 03:40 PM

i'm suppose to go out to dinner with teh fambam, i hope we get back in time, otherwise, i'm slapping a biiiitch.

kobe picspam.

NessaBruin · 08-23-2008, 03:45 PM

loves picspam!!!!

i know this party will be over in time since they rented a party hall and TMAC!!! I liked him, if only bc a friend from high school did and his nickname was pumpkin head and he said they called T-Mac that as a kid

miSStakentriSh · 08-23-2008, 03:47 PM

wait, wait. THEY RENTED TMAC? WTF?

peanut99 · 08-23-2008, 03:52 PM

picspam

NessaBruin · 08-23-2008, 03:52 PM

sorry my sentences got jumbled

wouldn't it be fun to rent NBA players

total awesomeness!

anyways got to go now but be back later in time for the game and all!!! eeeeeek!

miSStakentriSh · 08-23-2008, 03:53 PM

OH WHOA. i had to reread it like fifty times, then i finally got it. blonde moment for me right there, woops. XD it's like, 'yeah, we're gonna rent the entire laker team for our birthday party.' LOL.

later skater! talk to you later.

A, your icon is all kinds of adorable. guh!

peanut99 · 08-23-2008, 04:02 PM

bye N

Thanks! It's almost unfair how adorable him and his little girls are

and renting NBA players this needs to be made possible.

miSStakentriSh · 08-23-2008, 04:05 PM

LOL. we'd rent kobe like everyday. he'd be like, 'you guys again?

'

gaaaaah, i know! i'm so glad there are more photos of him and his girls now. i remember when there was virtually no pictures of natalia and him. he realized we all need a little bryant family in our lives. thanks kobe