A fantastic biographical read from Ben McGrath on Kobes journey in the NBA so far, with a sprinkling of choice quotes from the Mamba himself. Not to be missed. These were allowing a zone defense—a staple of European and amateur American basketball—instead of requiring constant man-to-man coverage; and the limits placed on “hand-checking,” a defensive action used to impede offensive flow. “I think what they’ve done has been very smart, in terms of how they’ve been able to make it such a global game,” Bryant told me. “I mean, that’s really what’s at the crux of it: a lot of big players in Europe weren’t post players”—brawny men who establish residence five feet from the hoop and play primarily with their backs turned to it. “They were skill players. So once the N.B.A. opened up the game, and allowed the zone in, now it made the game more appealing on a global scale.” Still, the game wasn’t as aggressively physical as it had once been. (“Makes me nauseous,” he said in Chicago. “You can’t touch a guy.”) And he felt that the current conditions made it too easy for the merely good to appear transcendent. Ball handlers were no longer as responsible for creating their own space in which to maneuver, and an effective pull-up jump shot and decent athleticism now enabled someone like Toronto’s mildly heralded Terrence Ross, say, to score fifty-one points in an evening. By contrast, the varied tricks of naturally gifted scorers—Bryant included the Knicks’ Carmelo Anthony and Durant in this category, along with himself—were no longer as useful. “I don’t care if you hand-check us with three hands,” he said, speaking now in New York, at Madison Square Garden. “If there’s nobody behind you, you’re not going to stop us. So the zone cripples some of the top scorers.”
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 02:00:01 +0000
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