“What does it matter? What does he want, a cookie for that?”
—Kobe Bryant, responding to LeBron James’ comments that what the Heat went through when the “super team” formed in Miami was much more pressure than what the Lakers have dealt with this season. The Kobe quote is via Arash Markazi of ESPNLosAngeles.com.
Kobe better have a cookie for Dwyane Wade, too, he said something similar.“No one will ever be able to compare what we went through,” James said. “Even though they’re not winning and they’re losing a lot of games, it’s still nowhere near what we went through. Yeah, right. That level of magnitude was nowhere near where ours was two years ago. Nothing. Nothing compares to it.”
“Because of everything that happened in 2010 with offseason signings, it was, automatically, just a lot of negative things that was said about us,” Wade said. “[Los Angeles] didn’t go through that at the beginning. They didn’t go through anything negative about bringing those guys together, so ours started off bad and it stayed bad for a while, and then we got better.”
Here we will point out that what the Heat went through and the animosity toward them was brought on in part by themselves. The pep rally, the “not three, not four, not five...” line from LeBron himself. They came off as arrogant and it turned a lot of fans off.
Some fans were bothered by the fact the three players (Chris Bosh, too) played a big role in getting together. Personally, the players having some power that used to belong to the teams is fine by me. But the amount of hubris surrounding LeBron’s entire free agent process, how Cleveland was left dangling, how teams had to come kiss his ring to pitch him, how he ended up in Miami was a PR disaster Miami brought on itself. The Lakers at least didn’t go that far.
