Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Flea and Knicks president Phil Jackson have formed an unlikely duo in their defense of Kobe Bryant against a scathing ESPN story on the Lakers star.
Flea is one of the celebrities who flocked to the Staples Center when Jackson was winning championships as coach in Los Angeles, and the two are sticking by Bryant on social media now.
The ESPN Magazine story pins the beginning of the Lakers’ decline to when Jackson departed the franchise in 2011 before resurfacing with the Knicks in a front-office role last season. And it places the blame on Bryant for the Lakers’ recent demise — they have gone from back-to-back champions in 2009 and ’10 to what’s expected to be one of the worst teams in the league this season.
Here’s a sampling of some of the anti-Bryant quotes from the story:
“Kobe is like the big rock in their front yard. You can’t mow over it, so you just have to mow around it.” – anonymous agent.
“I’ve had a lot of clients in the last five years, good players, who didn’t want to play with Kobe. They see that his teammates become the chronic public whipping boys. Anyone who could possibly challenge Kobe for the spotlight ends up becoming a pincushion for the media. Even Shaq.” –anonymous agent
“It’s horrendous. It’s evil. It’s a hard drug to quit when you’re winning. Kobe has cost the Lakers dearly in human capital. Kobe has hurt a lot of people. In some cases jeopardized careers.” – rival front office executive
Bryant seems to be taking the story more in stride than did Flea and Jackson, with whom he had a successful but tumultuous relationship.
“It’s not the first one and it won’t be the last one,” Bryant said about the ESPN story. “One thing I’ve come to understand over the years is that you’ll have a bad story that comes out on a Monday and it seems like it’s the end of the world and it seems like everybody’s taking shots at you. But time goes by and then you look back on it and it was just a Monday.
“Then you have another great story that comes out maybe a month later, or something like that, and it’s a fantastic story. And then there’s a bad story that comes out one month after that. So you understand that it’s a cycle, and things are never as good or as bad as they seem in the moment in time.”