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Kobe Bryant: Winning, still can't win
By Kelly Dwyer

It's been spinning around the internet for a few days, so you've likely seen it, but if you missed Christopher Reina's study on Kobe Bryant's shooting habits, and how they parlay into wins for the Lakers, it went something like this:

Kobe shoot over 20 times = Lakers bad.

Kobe shoot under 20 times = Lakers good.

It's a nice sentiment that works well with the popular ideal that Kobe is some ball-hogging freak by nature that has to somehow rein in his instincts to shoot every time down court. That he's so obsessed by putting up points and being the focal point that it's taken him years to understand that basketball is a team sport, and that he needs to, wait for it, "trust his teammates."

And it's all bollocks.

A study like this is so rife with caveats and qualifiers and chances for inaccuracy that it isn't worth its weight in however the hell you would weigh a webpage. I think you start with a Geiger Counter, convert into something tangible, and ... anyway, the "study" is pointless.

http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/blog/ball_dont_lie/post/Kobe-Bryant-Winning-still-can-t-win;_ylt=AtyzzqI.Tic23ptRCnDqo6i8vLYF?urn=nba,86015

really good article, needed to be written a long time ago.

Let the haters be haters, when Kobe gets some more rings on his finger, people will be back to oh well Kobe doesn't score much so why should he get credit!

lol... what's up with your sig?

Good read.

A RealGM article shout out!

here is a future sig-

"Here's why me and Kobe had problems,'' O'Neal told me last year. "Because it was two young guys going at it, and I wasn't going to lessen my game for him just because he was younger. I just wasn't going to do it.''

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/w...ml?eref=T1

semi-sentient wrote:lol... what's up with your sig?

Good read.

I'm trying to see what it feels like to have such a Sig! I feel different, like... LA has the softest team, umm Celtics bench is better than LA's.

shobe undercover?

Yes maybe, but to tell you the truth Rox:

shobe_81 wrote:I'm trying to see what it feels like to have such a Sig! I feel different, like... LA has the softest team, umm Celtics bench is better than LA's.

In the playoffs;
When Kobe shoots 24 or more shots Lakers are 5-1
When Kobe shoots 23 or less shots Lakers are 7-2
This proves the Lakers are better in the playoffs when he is a volume shooter.
When Kobe shoots 18 or more times Lakers are 9-3
When Kobe shoots 17 or less times Lakers are 3-0
When Kobe shoots between 24 and 30 shots Lakers are 5-0
When Kobe gets 2 or more Offensive Rebounds Lakers are 1-2
When Kobe gets 10 or more assists Lakers lose half their games
When Kobe gets 5 or more turnovers Lakers are 3-0
When Kobe gets 4 turnovers Lakers are 0-2
When Kobe plays between 38 and 42 minutes Lakers are 6-0
When Kobe makes exactly 13 shots Lakers are 0-2

I am pretty sure that the author is a poster on realgm. I think he is a fan of a team in the east.

Let me check my sources before I say more.....

It's nice to see somebody in the media articulate a truth that so many people here on realgm have been trying to say for the past four years.

I think those catch phrases "trusting his teammates" makes a good story, but I think the media is also fairly uncreative, and I doubt they even watch most of the games. Thus all these notions about Kobe have been perpetuated for so long.

And with all due respect to the home-grown realgm article, I thought that was a humor piece - "Lakers 38% better When Kobe Isn't a High Volume Shooter" - 38% better? I have a 67% chance of getting laid this weekend.

Anyways, Kelly Dwyer did a pretty good job of breaking it down, but obviously the main problem was the gross oversimplification and confusing correlation for causation.

The game, like life, moves forward, and basketball games aren't played in totals, but one play at a time.

For those who actually watch games, Kobe has consistently tried to get his teammates involved from the beginning of the game, and when his teammates come through, Kobe continues to play the facilitating role and plays a floor game rather than focus on scoring.

But when our team struggles, when the offense breaks down, THEN Kobe usually becomes a high-volume shooter. Obviously these are tough games, but it's Kobe's shot attempts that did us in?

That's ass backwards thinking, but that's why causation can't be determined without considering the sequence of events, the forward direction of time.

Otherwise, might as well look at the stat sheet and observe Mike Tyson wins 38% of his fights when he throws fewer than 50 punches.

Let's ignore the fact that he wins fights with fewer punches because he's knocking chumps out early. But let's run away with the stat, and claim that if Mike Tyson threw fewer punches, he would have knocked Lennox Lewis out.

Maybe you should take some elementary statistics before you use these numbers to hate on Kobe.


ROtFLMFAO.

I only care about the W-L column.

Here's another very good article about Kobe written in SI in April of 1998. After reading this you'd feel like you have a very good idea of why Kobe is who he is today It's quite long (7 pages) but a very good read.

Is Kobe Bryant the Second Coming of Magic or Michael?

Last December, before the Los Angeles Lakers' annual pilgrimage to Chicago, the team's director of public relations, John Black, quietly warned 19-year-old Kobe Bryant that the press was about to open public hearings into the matter of whether he was, indeed, the next Michael Jordan. Bryant could have gone into a slump right then.

"It doesn't bother me," he responded. "I expect to be that good."

Now he was really asking for trouble. For Jordan is the American Zeus, an utterly commercial god who scores, plays defense, wins championships and appears in the advertisements during timeouts. A few weeks after Bryant had been interviewed for the position in Chicago (he scored 33 points, many of them while being guarded by Jordan, who had 36), he was being promoted on one side of a full-page newspaper ad for the Feb. 8 All-Star Game. On the opposite side of the page was the requisite picture of Jordan, his tongue dangling like a royal flag.

"I said, 'Cool,' " Bryant says. "It was like they were making it out to be some big one-on-one showdown."

Others were more concerned. "Wasn't Harold Miner supposed to have been the next Michael Jordan?" asked New Jersey Nets assistant coach Don Casey. Miner vanished from the league as if he had been caught staring at the Lost Ark of the Covenant. Grant Hill, exhibiting the wisdom of a Duke graduate, seemed to turn away from comparisons with Jordan at the last moment, but the unexplainable forces of the universe punished him nonetheless by making him play for Jordan's former coach, Doug Collins, the screaming Hydra.

good read!

Damn, the author absolutely destroyed the other article, my gosh

This should be posted on the General Board as a response to the other post but I don't know, what's the chance the thread gets MOVED back to the Laker Forum guys??

garcia3 wrote:Damn, the author absolutely destroyed the other article, my gosh

This should be posted on the General Board as a response to the other post but I don't know, what's the chance the thread gets MOVED back to the Laker Forum guys??

already there.

http://www.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=796346

funny how the haters can't stop the the hate.