Kobe Bryant's comment on the inferiority of American high-school players to more skillful European counterparts and how the greed of AAU Basketball played a big role into that should not be interpreted seriously.
Perhaps, there's a hidden agenda behind those statements like recruiting a couple of upcoming free-agents who happened to be born and raised in the continent across the Atlantic.
Basketball Insiders writer Jabari Davis believed Bryant's take on the decline of skill-level among prep ballers in the United States indeed created a firestorm in the grass-root level, particularly in the AAU Basketball, which the Los Angeles Lakers star think the main culprit to this dilemma.
AAU basketball," Bryant said in an interview with ESPN. "Horrible, terrible AAU basketball. It's stupid. It doesn't teach our kids how to play the game at all so you wind up having players that are big and they bring it up and they do all this fancy crap and they don't know how to post. They don't know the fundamentals of the game. It's stupid."
Davis stressed that Kobe has some point about how AAU basketball big wigs are monetizing from these up-and-coming basketball players without teaching them the fundamentals of the game. Then again, the Basketball Insiders writer thinks it shouldn't be construed as a blanket statement, because there are still some talented and fundamentally sound players out there ready to make an impact in the next level.
Moreover, Davis also claimed that Bryant might be just trying to make an impression to European NBA players, particularly Memphis Grizzlies center Marc Gasol and Phoenix Suns point guard Goran Dragic, who both expected to hit the free-agency market.
"To be honest, I think Bean is being a tactician with these quotes. I've heard murmurings that he would love to play with guys like Marc Gasol and Goran Dragic moving forward, so maybe that's something he has in mind when complimenting European players? I mean, beyond having an actual affinity towards that style, I think there is an agenda there," Davis said of Bryant's tactical approach.
Bryant, who will play the final-year of his lucrative two-year extension next season, is dying to have a high-caliber supporting casts around him and make another push for his 6th NBA championship ring before he closes the curtain on his legendary career.
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