Lakers: How Team U.S.A. Recruited Kobe Bryant
Following a bronze medal finish at the 2004 Olympics, Team U.S.A. underwent some drastic cosmetic changes. Jerry Colangelo was brought in to run the club, and made several big adjustments. As the new Netflix documentary "Redeem Team" (out this weekend!) reveals, Colangelo ditched the prior committee system Team U.S.A. had used in picking coaches and stars (making himself the ultimate decision-maker), and he thus oversaw the team selections and coaching picks. The goal was to lock in a coach for a four-year period at least, Colangelo reveals now, coaching the club through qualifying events and the FIBA World Cup tournament during non-Olympic years.
One big piece of that puzzle was longtime Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski. Another was the veteran leadership Coach K felt the team was sorely lacking in 2004, when it was comprised of essentially two disparate camps: vets in their prime, like San Antonio Spurs great Tim Duncan and then-Suns star Stephon Marbury, plus some crucial young players.
Ahead of the team's 2007 Olympic qualifiers, Kryzeswki recruited Los Angeles Lakers Hall of Fame shooting guard Kobe Bryant to join the club.
"We knew we needed some older players," Krzyzewski says in new interview footage. "That's why we went out and we recruited Kobe Bryant."
"Nobody brought more baggage to Team USA than Kobe Bryant," Los Angeles Times reporter Bill Plaschke says now. "He had been ostracized by the league. He came into this at a point of his career where it could have gone either way. He had run Shaquille O'Neal, a beloved figure out of L.A., they thought he snitched out Shaq's personal life to the police, they thought he was selfish. He had demanded a trade in the parking lot of a Ralph's grocery store in Newport Beach."
"I came up to Kobe at the first practice, and I see him," Plaschke continued. "He said, 'Well I'm glad you're here. You're gonna see something. You're gonna see [Team] U.S.A. be great again. This is my challenge. This is bigger than anything I've ever done.' This was the start of the second chapter in the life of Kobe Bryant."
The documentary then moves into a supplemental anecdote about Kobe's game-changing mindset to the whole experience, that apparently went down during an early practice.
"This is like 30 seconds into the [first] scrimmage," Colangelo explains, setting the scene. "There's a loose ball. And he's diving head first on the floor, over and over for the loose balls. Tell me that didn't set an example. It set a big example."
"They dove for loose balls, they got big rebounds," Plaschke remarked. "They played great defense, they were in people's faces. And all of that started with Kobe Bryant."
During what looks to be a subsequent film room session or strategy meeting, Bryant spoke to his coaches and teammates about his own approach to the forthcoming competition. "Knowing a lot of guys that play overseas, they think we're a bunch of showboat players than can score a lot of points and do a lot of things offensively but won't do the dirty work, because we're all star players, we won't do the dirty work to win and to beat them on a consistent basis," Bryant said. "To me, I think that's the thing that's gonna get us over the hump."
"He knew that he had to show the guys that he was all-in, and the way to do that was to play defense," Coach K relays in documentary interview footage. "That was his way of saying to the team, 'You can talk about things, but when you're actually doing it, that's the main thing.'"
Bryant's psychotic work ethic eventually proved to be contagious for the rest of the team, as the documentary relayed in another fun anecdote.
