Bryant was a thinking man\u2019s player, putting thought into every micro-decision he made on the court to give himself the upper hand over his rivals.<\/p>\n
Kobe would even call legends like Scottie Pippen<\/a> and ask them questions about their game. It became clear early on that he wanted to focus on the finer points of the game.<\/p>\n And one LA Lakers<\/a> legend thinks it is this sharpness and intelligence that made Bryant the perfect player to play under Phil Jackson<\/a>.<\/p>\n Former LA Lakers star Brian Shaw was a guest on Byron Scott\u2019s podcast. When they reminisced about playing under Phil Jackson, Shaw made some interesting comments.<\/p>\n He admitted that the triangle offense that Phil Jackson ran was incredibly complex, and a player as smart as Kobe Bryant was the perfect player to run it. But the modern NBA stars aren\u2019t as smart to play in that system.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you\u2019re running the triangle or you\u2019re running what we call the Princeton offense back in the day, if you\u2019ve got players who have a high basketball IQ, like you said, you ain\u2019t got to call s\u2014.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause the defense dictates what you\u2019re going to run. And so if you got players who are smart, they figure that s\u2014 out in a heartbeat.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd again, like you said, if you\u2019re going to pressure us, we would just go farther back out. Now we\u2019re going to open up the court that much more. So now you\u2019ve got set up back door cuts and everything else.<\/p>\n \u201cSo it made it so much more difficult for teams to guard you because, like you said, you can call one action.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s reads, all it is reads. And I think one of the reasons they say it won\u2019t work today, players aren\u2019t smart enough.\u201d<\/p>\n Kobe Bryant\u2019s greatness shouldn\u2019t take away from modern NBA stars<\/p>\n While Shaw is well within his rights to praise Kobe Bryant for his smarts and intellect on the court, to do so at the expense of modern stars is quite unfair.<\/p>\n Kobe Bryant was a hard man to impress<\/a>, but there are several stars from the modern generation who earned his respect with their play.<\/p>\n To suggest that some of the brightest stars from the generations that followed Bryant\u2019s, such as LeBron James<\/a>, Stephen Curry<\/a>, and Kevin Durant<\/a>, couldn\u2019t thrive in Jackson\u2019s system is absurd.<\/p>\n This is a larger problem in the NBA today, where players from the past often try to elevate themselves and their peers, but do so primarily by trying to put down the stars that came after them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One legendary LA Lakers figure talked about the difference between Kobe Bryant and many of the modern superstars…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":265897,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3790],"tags":[7,1536,4034,1698,300,4044,251,150,4033,4043,6,3838,574],"class_list":{"0":"post-265896","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles-lakers","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-kobe-bryant","10":"tag-la","11":"tag-la-lakers","12":"tag-lakers","13":"tag-lalakers","14":"tag-los-angeles","15":"tag-los-angeles-lakers","16":"tag-losangeles","17":"tag-losangeleslakers","18":"tag-nba","19":"tag-phil-jackson","20":"tag-western-conference"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/115144486091408354","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Kobe](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/GettyImages-104451601-1-870x627.jpg\")
Photo by Kevork Djansezian\/Getty ImagesModern NBA stars couldn\u2019t play under Phil Jackson\u2019s triangle offense<\/p>\n