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Kobe Bryant Isn’t The Reason For Los Angeles Lakers’ Downfall

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Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports

Along with calling major networks “idiots” and scoring 27 in a preseason game, Kobe Bryant has been the subject of quite a high amount of criticism recently. So then I thought, “is some of the criticism fair for Bryant?” That is, is Bryant the center of all the problems for the Los Angeles Lakers in the past few seasons?

I really don’t think so.

Some have spoken of selfishness and critical leadership flaws within Bryant. I’m not sure I see this as an issue because another player had this as well — his name is Michael Jordan. If you were going with the narrative, however, some other names come to mind: Dwight Howard, Andrew Bynum and Ramon Sessions.

Howard is a funny name to bring up, considering he was part of the Orlando Magic‘s plan that broke the Finals-reaching team up, and was involved in the firing of Stan Van Gundy. This is not the person I look at and think, well, at least he is unselfish. He has not been a bastion of righteousness since he got in the league, and he has recently burned Chandler Parsons by saying that on the Houston Rockets roster, there was simply Howard, James Harden and a bunch of role players. Parsons now plays for the Dallas Mavericks.

Bynum comes in at a close second to Howard. The most famous thing that he has done recently is grow his hair and become the face of internet memes. It was Phil Jackson who said of Bynum, “… he did a wonderful job. But what happened was it took Pau [Gasol] out of the game, and it took the team away from some of their game. They changed the style dramatically.”

It doesn’t seem like a character flaw that got into the middle of the style of the Lakers, but rather executive management. A recent article said that Jackson has a different leadership style than Jim Buss, and that he likes to see, touch and feel the product (or basketball players) in front of him running up and down the court. With the leadership at odds with one another, its tough to think that it was simply Kobe that ruined things. This may have been one of the reasons why Jackson left shortly after.

With Sessions, things may be fairly simple. Sessions is not a true point guard because he is more of a scoring guard. He is one who has the ball in his hands and takes away from the touches and shots that Kobe might be taking. It makes sense that Kobe and Sessions would clash because the two of their games are at odds with one another.

This is a question of chemistry that would arise in any star’s situation. The stars, the true stars, have a certain amount of pride in the way they play the game, and are not just going out there and bouncing a ball.

Bryant has been called a lot of things, and maybe some of them justified. However, Kobe is definitely worth the money that he is getting paid because the Lakers organization makes plenty of money off his back, and he has a competitive spirit that transcends the games that they have played.

To finally answer the issue between Kobe and Shaquille O’Neal, Robert Horry decided to respond. He said, “I think Phil Jackson started that that feud. It happened many times that after team practice he would say, ‘Kobe said this about Shaq, and Shaq said that about Kobe’ … We couldn’t believe how could that happen, because just the day before we saw them together, jumping on one another. … It was blown out of proportion by the media.”

It would be nice to be able to hammer the nail in the coffin of Bryant’s legacy by throwing him under the bus, but things have been much more complex than reports have shown. Jackson was quoted by saying that even Jordan never worked as hard as Kobe, even though he also says that Michael was better.

We always tend to look for scapegoats, and Bryant has been one nearly his entire career.

Christopher Cruz is a Miami Heat writer for www.RantSports.com. Follow him on Twitter @_chris_cruz, or add him to your network on Google.

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