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Kobe Bryant says he would hire a car service to get to road games before the team’s first bus so he could be inside the arena before the crowd arrived and prepare in complete silence, and says he would prepare meticulously for whatever looks the opposing defense was going to give him “If we had a road game, say Miami, a 7:30pm game, I’d still get up early and do weights. I’d have breakfast, get on the bus, go to shootaround, get my shots up, come back to the room, do treatment, ice, stretch. I might watch a movie, I might watch a little extra film.” “Then for the bus to the stadium, we had two buses. The first bus was generally around 4:45pm and the second bus was around 5:30pm. I was generally on the early one, just to get treatment and get shots up, because I liked getting to the arenas early.” “Sometimes I would actually get a car and leave before the first bus because even though the first bus was leaving early, there were still people coming into the stands. I liked getting to arenas when there was nobody in there and you could kind of feel the purity of the place, especially in a road environment.” “As far as how many shots I was trying to get up, it depended on how I was feeling physically and who we were playing. If I was playing the Spurs, I’d work on short-corner shots, mid-elbow shots, those types of shots because those were the shots their defense would give up. If I was playing Memphis and Tony Allen, I’d work on a lot of back-to-the-basket stuff, putting my body on Tony, making sure my footwork was right, making sure I was hiding the ball so he couldn’t swipe it. I’d go through those muscle-memory things. The positions of the shots would vary depending on the opponent.”

Byron Scott says that Kobe Bryant would lift at 4am, come back and make 500 shots, do a full practice, then work out again at night, and says Kobe told him he did that because over the course of five years the gap would become impossible to close for his competition “There’s three people in my lifetime that I admired on how hard they worked: Jerry Rice, Walter Payton, Kobe Bryant. His was legendary. Kobe, as far as he never worked out just once a day. He would get up at 4 in the morning, or he’d say, ‘Meet me at the gym at 4 in the morning,’ and he would work out for two, three hours lifting because he knew he had to get stronger, had to get bigger.” “Then he would go eat breakfast, and then he’d come back and he’d make 500 shots, so he’d be there another two hours. Then he’d get ready for practice. He’d go through a two-and-a-half-hour, three-hour practice like it’s nothing. Then he’d go have lunch, chill out for another hour, then he’d come back at night and work out again.” “And it was crazy to me because his method of it was scientific. He was like, ‘B, if I work out three times a day and all these other guys who are so-called great players work out just for practice, they just work out that one time a day, over a five-year period they can’t catch me. I’ve worked out that much. I’ve worked on my body, I’ve worked on my footwork, I’ve worked on my shot, so five, ten years from now they can’t catch me. They’re that far behind.’” “I never thought about it until he explained it to me. I was a guy that in the summertime, go to the gym, lift weights, go to the track, run for two hours, then go play — and that’s equivalent to three times a day. But I never thought of it or put it in the type of method that he was talking about.” “I just thought it was ironic that a young man got it that quickly. He understood that if I worked out harder and longer and more than the guy who’s supposed to be on my level, sooner or later he won’t be on my level anymore. Kobe was extremely intelligent. He just said, ‘Scientifically, if I do this, you can’t catch me.’ And he was right. It worked.”

Phil Jackson says he told Michael Jordan he needed to score less if he wanted to win a championship because scoring titles and championships don’t go together “When I was given the job as the head coach of the Chicago Bulls, I brought Michael Jordan in to speak with me, and I said, ‘You know, you’ve averaged 37, 38, 36 points a game the last three years. You know, you’ve been the scoring champion, but if you look back at the history of the NBA, there hasn’t been a scoring champion for almost 15 years who’s won the championship. They don’t go together.’” “‘And we need to take the focus off you, which is what teams now tilt their whole defense towards, stopping Michael Jordan, and open it up for the rest of our team. And it means you taking less shots a game. That’s important.’ And he stopped me and he said, ‘Are you going to run an equal-opportunity offense like Tex Winter’s been talking about?’” “I said, ‘Yeah, I guess you could call it an equal-opportunity offense, but I’m not going to be calling the plays from the sideline. You guys are going to be reading it on the floor. So if the 24-second clock is running down and it becomes red, which is the call everybody makes when it’s under five seconds, we’ll teach the team how to get the ball to you at the end of that clock because then you can score.’” “He said, ‘Well, I don’t think that I have to give up a scoring championship. I could score 32 points a game and still win a scoring championship. That’s only eight points a quarter.’ I said, ‘Michael, I had trouble scoring eight points a game when I was a player.’” “‘But rather than scoring eight points a quarter, why don’t you save that for the fourth quarter and score 14 points in the fourth quarter and take us home? And you can do what you want to do during the early part of the game and then put the onus and the nail in the coffin in the fourth quarter to seal the deal.’ He kind of liked that idea.” “And, you know, I think we lost two or three of our first games that we played in my first year coaching, and everybody had to kind of figure out how to do it, how to play together when the ball was dictating the action, when the passes were dictating what people would do, rather than a specific number for a player being called from the sideline. And I gave the team a little bit of authority, which is exactly what a coach wants to happen.”