It's Hard Not To Love Kobe's Pettiness

(NBC Sports) – Pau Gasol takes incredible pride in representing Spain on the international stage — he still wants to play for them in the World Cup next summer, when he will be 39. He has a FIBA World Cup title and three EuroBasket titles for Spain, plus two Olympics silver medals. Both silvers because of losses to the USA in the Gold Medal game.

Kobe Bryant beat Gasol for one of those gold medals in 2008 in Beijing. Then Kobe tormented him with it, and used it as that particular Kobe style of motivation, via 24/7 Sports.

“One of my favorite ones, Pau hates it every time I tell this story,” Bryant recalls. “He hates it. We lost to the Celtics in ’08 and it was a physical series. I mean they beat the crap out of us. We go into the Olympic year, that year, we wind up playing Spain for the gold-medal match and we beat them. So now we come back to start training camp and Pau shows up first day of training camp, I have my gold medal hanging in his locker. The one thing he truly, truly love is his country. That is like everything to him. So it just drove him crazy. He said ‘You’re an ass—!’ I said, ‘Listen Pau, you lost to the Celtics, you lost to us in the gold-medal match, let’s not make this three in a row this year. Let’s win this thing.’ That was it for him. Pau was a phenomenon to begin with. For him, it was just stepping up a level of physicality, that we needed him to get to, which he did and we went on to win back-to-back championships.”

We all know Kobe is a bit of a dickhead and like Jordan uses absolutely everything he can to motivate himself to be great. The thing is, not everyone is wired like Kobe, so to hear that he hung his gold medal right in Pau’s face like that is pretty mean. Especially because you knew he knew how much international play meant to Gasol. Frankly I’m not all that surprised because Kobe is literally a basketball psychopath, and you knew deep down he had good intentions, that he was just trying to push the right buttons in Pau for him to take his game to another level, but that doesn’t make it any less brutal.

Now obviously it worked, I can tell you from personal experience. Looking back, I’m not sure Gasol gets enough credit for how awesome he was as a Laker. The second he arrived in LA it was a perfect fit, and in 7 seasons Gasol had a very respectable 17.7/9.9/3.5 averages on 52% shooting. It always felt weird to me that people considered him soft during that era, when he had the second highest rebounding numbers of his career while in LA. Once the playoffs started, Pau was just as good too. In those back to back title years he was a legit force, and overall in six playoff seasons threw up 16.8/10.1/3.5 on 52% shooting. Basically he was one of the few players that did not regress when the competition got tougher, if anything he went the other way. I mean the Celtics legit had no answer for him in that 2010 Finals, and it’s a no brainer that he’s a first ballot HOF player.

So while the move from Kobe may have been fucked up to some degree, at the end of the day it worked so you bet your ass Kobe won’t apologize for it. I think we all can agree if it wasn’t for Gasol’s 19/18/4 in Game 7 back in 2010 the Lakers probably don’t win that Finals since Kobe couldn’t make a damn shot, and I just hope Gasol clapped back to Kobe with some sort of joke about that title. Maybe a little dig how he needed him the same way he needed Shaq in order to win, you know, hit Kobe where it hurts. While I personally hated this duo with every fiber of my being, I can admit they were so good together.