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During his 20-year NBA career playing for the Los Angeles Lakers, Kobe Bryant won five NBA Championships and made it to two other NBA Finals, coming up short of victory. 11 times the Lakers won more than 50 games, and three times they won over 60. So he was on a lot of very good teams.
However, by the time Lou Williams joined Bryant on the Lakers for the 2015-2016 season those days were long gone.
At that point, the Lakers were coming off two seasons in which the team combined for only 48 wins. And in Williams’ two seasons in L.A. with Kobe the team was even worse, going 43-126.
As one can imagine, knowing how maniacally competive Kobe Bryant is, all that losing did not sit well with The Black Mamba.
This notion was definitively confirmed on Showtime’s All the Smoke podcast this week by Williams when Matt Barnes asked him what it was like playing with Kobe on the Lakers as he made his way out of the NBA.
“It was interesting,” said Williams. “I wish I could have played with Kobe when he was cold, like I felt like he could have did something special for my career. I just think it wasn’t managed right. I think we could have been a lot better than we were. We kind of just turned into, like, some Harlem Globetrotters sh*t. Because it was like, at first it wasn’t the farewell tour… the second [season] it turned into the farewell tour and then at the same time it was like, they were trying to develop the young guys. And I was like, realistically you can’t do both. You can’t develop these youg guys then tell them sh*t don’t matter when the game starts. It wasn’t managed great. But as far as Kobe goes, he was super cool, I enjoyed competing with him, and just being around him. It’s just a different energy when you’re around him and you’re on the floor with him.”
Williams added that he was disappointed he didn’t get to play with Killer Kobe #8, but he did see flashes of it.
“F**k, he gonna be mad at me for this, but we got blew out in Portland and he came in the locker room and he was like, ‘From now on out, every time down the court, I touch the ball. Y’all are going to learn what it’s like to play with Kobe Bean f**kin’ Bryant.’ And I’m sitting there like, oh, this motherf**ker’s serious.”
Check out everything else Williams had to say about Kobe and a lot more in the video below.