What Pau Gasol Once Did That Caused Kobe To Tell Phil Jackson, ‘We’re Going To The Finals!’

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Even though it’s Kobe Bryant who’s on the retirement tour, the repeated walks down memory lane during his last season has conjured up all sorts of long-dormant recollections — like Kobe’s former teammates, and what they meant to his career. One of those guys is still kicking around the league, a model of consistency and positivity named Pau Gasol.

Gasol’s Bulls will come to L.A. on Thursday to take on Kobe’s Lakers, which was cause for remembrance in Kobe’s case — as many things have been during his final season. Kobe discussed how Pau “wasn’t really appreciated” by Lakers fans, the media and the front office, the latter of whom constantly dropped his name in trade rumors, eager to move on from the second-best player on the title-winning teams of 2009 and 2010.

But in happier memories, Kobe also recalled when he knew that Pau could take them to the peaks they’d only seen when Shaquille O’Neal was around.

“As soon as he caught the ball and he finished it, I ran back to the bench, I said, ‘Yes, Phil, we’ve got a big that can catch it and finish! We’re going to the Finals!” Bryant said, referencing former Lakers coach Phil Jackson.

“And Phil just looked at me, he started laughing. But I was dead-ass serious. Then Pau, I come back in the timeout, I’m saying, ‘Pau, the defense is playing this way, so maybe you could go here, flash here and then you look to skip [pass], [and] he said, ‘If I could skip it there.’ So he was able to connect the dots himself.

“It was like, ‘Oh, I’ve got the guy that I can really scheme with.’ Then the rest of the guys can kind of fall in line from that. So his intellect was what made him the most dangerous.”

Pau was never a dominant defender, but he was also much more than a big who can catch and finish — he’s one of the most consistent scoring big men the league has ever seen. Leaving aside one injury-shortened year, Gasol has averaged between 17 and 21 points every season of his career, and has never averaged fewer than 7.3 rebounds in a season. He’s been in the league since 2001!

Gasol might wind up in the Hall of Fame someday with those numbers and his two rings, but the fact remains that for years, Laker fans would have been happy to trade him to rearrange the team around Kobe and another title run. Take it from the man himself:

“I think the city of L.A. didn’t really appreciate what he did and what we had, and so as a consequence, everybody kind of fell in line with the [former Lakers coach] Mike D’Antoni rhetoric of small ball and all this other bulls—. For a guy that has two championships to be treated that way, you don’t do that, man.”

Now that Pau is putting up his usual stellar numbers with the Chicago Bulls and after his first starting spot in the 2014 All-Star Game, all while the Lakers toil at the bottom of the Western Conference standings, we’re pretty sure Lakers fans miss Pau almost as much as Kobe does. Maybe some fans will even offer up an apology for the way they so vociferously called for his ouster during his last couple seasons in LA.

(Via ESPN)

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