Kobe Bryant’s retirement tour and especially his retirement game was met with a lot of controversy. While one more vocal group loved the attention he was getting and all the goodbyes from fans and opposing teams, others recognized that the celebratory tour was coming at the cost of the Lakers’ success.
One such person is Jason Whitlock, who ripped the Kobe retirement game for being a farce. Here’s what Whitlock said on “The Herd” on FOX Sports Thursday:
Here’s the thing: it’s never easy to manage the situation when you have a franchise legend aging and declining. Would you prefer to have the player and team endure an ugly divorce where the star is “mistreated” and the team at least is slightly better? Or would you prefer to have the team perform poorly but give the star a proper sendoff? I really think that is only something the fans can answer, so I don’t necessarily agree with Whitlock about that point.
But one area I agree with him on was him pointing out what a joke it was that Magic Johnson called Kobe the greatest Laker ever. We rolled our eyes at that because everyone should already know that Magic only speaks in one language: hyperbole.
Lastly, isolating the Shaq/Kobe thing to being a Kobe problem is somewhat unfair; both players and their massive egos are equally to blame for the split. At least Kobe did help the team win two more titles after the fact.
