Chalk it up to old age or pending retirement, but Kobe Bryant doesn’t seem particularly impressed with this young Lakers’ core…yet. Why should he be? They’ve been wildly inconsistent, and the losses have piled up all around them this season like some sort of giant, irrevocable metaphor.
Most of that has to do with their youth and inexperience. Some of them are still teenagers, for crying out loud. Kobe himself wasn’t ready to helm a team at that age, so it makes sense he’d be reluctant to peg any of them as future franchise leaders. To clarify, Kobe doesn’t think much about the proverbial “passing of the torch” to begin with, as he told a group of reporters in a wide-ranging interview on Monday.
Bryant: “Torches never get passed. You’ve got to earn them.“
— Bill Oram (@billoram) March 28, 2016
Prodded a little further about who might assume the role of a potential team leader for the Lakers moving forward, he responded “if you have to ask that question, the answer’s already there.” He doubled down on that assessment later when asked about why type of player the Lakers should draft (undoubtedly with a very high pick in the lottery this summer) when he said “a franchise player.”
It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of the Lakers’ current roster, but the irony is that the franchise won’t have a clear perspective of how well their young players will gel or who will emerge as the alpha dog until they’ve had a chance to fully step outside of Kobe’s shadow, a reality that will come soon enough.
