Nobody knows what Kobe Bryant’s game will look like when the season rolls around. Kobe says he’s even unsure. What we do know is that he won’t be the same. New Laker coach Byron Scott has plans for how he plans on using Kobe.
As a way to preserve the legs of his aging superstar, Scott plans on sitting Kobe out of back to backs.
So let me bring up a scenario here. Say there’s a game on the East Coast, went into double-overtime, and Kobe played a lot of those minutes. And then you’ve got a game the very next night. You notice that maybe he’s not moving around so good, is it going to be easy for you to tell Kobe Bryant, ‘We’re going to have to limit your minutes tonight. Maybe you take a night off?’
Yeah it’s going to be easy, but it’s going to be hard to probably have that happen! [Laughs] But again, he’s so competitive, he wants to win, and I do too. But I don’t want to win at the expense of having my one of my guys get hurt. And sometimes, like I said, we’re going to sit down, me and my trainer have already sat down, already started talking about the amount of minutes Kobe should probably play, going into this season. And I have to stand fast on that. I have to make sure that when he’s up to those minutes, that’s it, no matter what the game situation is, as much as I want to win, as much as he wants to win, I’m not going to sacrifice his health to try to win games.
