Transcription
Now tell Stephen A. Smith he wants out of LA.
"Wayson, you're still under contract with them. Are you saying right here on this show that you want to be traded?"
"Yeah, I would I would like to be traded, yeah. Yeah, I would like to be traded and as tough as it is to say that."
"Is there anything that the Los Angeles Lakers could do to make you change your mind and and and decide not that you do not want to be traded?"
"No."
"Nothing?"
"No."
That is May 30th, 2007. A Wednesday morning. Kobe Bryant is on the phone with Stephen A. Smith, not the debate show guy you know now. This is Smith still writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer, doing a radio hit on 150 ESPN in New York, and Kobe just told him on live radio that there's nothing the Lakers can do to keep him. Three-time champion coming off a season where he led the league in scoring, 28 years old, and he wants out.
Here's a thing nobody tells you about this story. It is not really about Kobe wanting to leave the Lakers. It is about what happens when the most competitive human being on the planet realizes the people running his franchise have been managing him instead of leveling with him for 3 years straight. And by the end of this, you're going to find that Kobe himself admitted years later that this whole outburst wasn't really an outburst at all. It was a plan.
Let's rewind, not to May 2007, further than that, to July 2004. Shaq is gone, traded to Miami for Lamar Odom, Caron Butler, Brian Grant, and a first-round pick. Kobe resigns for 7 years and $136 million the day after, and the story everybody told, the story that basically become gospel in LA is that Kobe wanted Shaq gone. That the two of them couldn't coexist, so ownership picked 25-year-old over the 32-year-old, and that was that. Kobe let people believe that for 3 years. 3 years of Kobe ran Shaq out of town takes, [music] and he never said a word publicly.
Why stay quiet about something like that? Simple. He didn't need to fight it yet. The Lakers were rebuilding. Fine. He assumed it was a rebuild, a fast one, not this. Instead, three straight years without winning a single playoff series, first-round exits two years running, Kwame Brown at center, Smush Parker starting at point guard for a team that is supposedly title-hunting with the best player alive on the roster. In March of 2007, Kobe drops 65 points in overtime just to beat a bad Portland team, and it barely moves the needle because everybody already knows what this Lakers team actually is, him and then nothing.
May 2007, the Phoenix Suns bounce the Lakers in five games, first round, and that is when this whole thing actually starts. May 27th, two days after elimination, Kobe talks to the Times, and for the first time, he doesn't play it safe. "I am still frustrated. I am waiting for them to make some changes." Not exactly fireworks, but it is the first crack.
May 28th, Kobe goes further, publicly says he wants Jerry West, the architect of the Showtime Lakers, back in front office. That is a direct shot at Mitch Kupchak, West's own guy, the sitting GM. Jim Buss tells the Times in response, "Kobe Bryant is a Laker for life." Nobody in that quote sounds worried yet.
Then May 29th, a Tuesday, Times runs a piece with one line in it that changed everything. An anonymous Lakers insider tells the paper, "As a Lakers insider notes, it was Bryant's insistence on getting away from Shaquille O'Neal that got them in this mess." Three years of silence, and now somebody inside his own organization goes out of their way to pin the blame back on him in print.
Kobe's response starts on his own website. Most people only remember the radio interview, but this comes first. He posts the whole story in his own words, a meeting at the Four Seasons in 2004, Jerry Buss telling him directly he wasn't resigning Shaq no matter what Kobe decided about his own free agency. Kobe says he's stayed quiet for years because he didn't want to look like he was ducking blame, but now that a Lakers insider is trying to pin it on him anyway, he's done protecting people who won't protect him.
And then that same day, in the middle of all this, Jerry Buss gets arrested DUI 12:50 in the morning, Carlsbad, a gold Mercedes crossing the double yellow. "Although I was driving only a short distance, it was a bad decision, and I was wrong to do it. It was a mistake I will not make again." The owner of the team gets pulled over for a drunk driving the same day his franchise player is publicly accuse him of lying. You could not write a better week than this if you tried, which bring us back to that Wednesday morning call.
Kobe lays out the whole Four Seasons story on live radio, confirms Shaq backed him up, Shaq telling Smith separately, "I believe Kobe Bryant 100%." And when Smith finally asks the question point-blank, is there anything the Lakers can do to keep you? Kobe doesn't hedge. "I would like to be traded, yeah. And as tough as it is to say that, as tough as it is to come to that conclusion, there's no other alternative."
3 hours later, and this is the part people will forget, Kobe's on with Dan Patrick and it sounds like a completely different guy. "I don't want to go anywhere else. I want to be here for the rest of my career." Phil Jackson had called him in between the two interviews. Kobe says Jackson talked him down. Except later that same afternoon, a Times reporter asks him again directly, do you still want to be traded? "It is just a matter of I don't want to go no place else." Asked point-blank if he still wanted to be traded, "yes."
So, which is it? Depends what time of day you caught him. That is not an decision, by the way. Hold on to that thought. It matters for how this whole thing actually ends.
4 years later in December 2011, Kobe's frustrated with the Lakers again. Different issue, different era. He's upset about a coaching hire he found out by reading it online and in the middle of wanting to the New York Post about that, he says something that recontextualized the entire 2007 saga. "I've never known what's going on. That is why I went public in May 2007 and demanded a trade when it became obvious to me that the management wasn't trying to compete for a championship. I felt my only recourse was to embarrass Jerry Buss into doing it."
Read that again. "My only recourse was to embarrass him into doing it." That is not a guy who snapped. That is a guy who ran the numbers, decided reasoning with ownership privately wasn't working, and made a calculated decision to blow the thing up publicly because public pressure is the one lever a player has that a front office doesn't control. And no, bro, wasn't a crack in the armor. It was the plan, and it worked just not the way you think.
Because the Lakers didn't trade him in May or June, but actually flew out to meet Kobe in Spain that June. Kobe was on vacation watching Barcelona practice, and Kobe reiterated the trade demand face-to-face. Both sides agreed to keep the conversation private. Phil Plashke didn't let it stay private. His column that June is one of the more brutal things ever written about a franchise player in that city, comparing Kobe to Paris Hilton, accusing him of trampling on the loyalty of fans who wore his jersey for over a decade. "At this moment, Bryant is not Magic Johnson. He is Paris Hilton." Around the same time, two strangers in a parking lot caught Kobe on a phone camera wanting about the organization and tried to sell the footage. Not a good summer for anybody's public image.
Full camp starts, and it is still not resolved. Buss goes public about the Spain conversation, breaking the private agreement, and Kobe skips practices in response. Phil Jackson tells reporters, "Obviously, he hasn't thrown his heart and soul into performing on the floor." Trade talks with Chicago heat up. Kobe is actually first choice, he'd admit years later, but collapsed over the inclusion of Luol Deng, Bulls fans starts chanting Kobe during home losses in November hoping it doesn't happen.
What actually changes things isn't a trade demand working. It is a 20-year-old center named Andrew Bynum starting to look like something real in the first half of that season. Then Bynum gets hurt and instead of standing pat, Mitch Kupchak, the same GM Kobe had basically tried to get replaced with Jerry West 7 months earlier, pulls off the trade that saves the entire era. February 2nd, 2008, Pau Gasol from Memphis for Kwame Brown, a young Javaris Crittenton, and draft picks. Kobe scores 46 that same night. "I have to take my hat off to Dr. Buss and Mitch for going forward with this." 8 months after Pluto, 8 months after my only recourse was to embarrass him.
The Lakers make the finals that June. Kobe wins his first MVP. Over the next three seasons, three finals appearances, back-to-back titles.
So, here's the actual answer to why Kobe Bryant demanded a trade in 2007. It wasn't one thing. It was three years of broken promises and anonymous leak that tried to pin the Shaq trade on him after he'd stayed quiet about it out of loyalty and by his own admission years later, a calculated bet that embarrassing his own owner in public was the only language that front office actually understood. It almost blew up the whole era. Instead, it is the reason the era happened at all because the Gasol trade doesn't get made, not on that timeline, maybe not ever, without a guy publicly saying he'd rather go play on Pluto 8 months earlier. Sometimes the most competitive person on the planet doesn't win by being patient. He wins by making everyone around him too uncomfortable not to fix the problem.