paul pierce'ın kariyeri boyunca savunmakta en çok zorladığı oyuncular listesinde sanırım birinci sırada olan geçtiğimiz sezon emekli olmuş süper yıldız.
paul pierce kobe hakkında bunları yazmış:
"I still remember watching his 81-point game. I think everybody who watched that game remembers where they were — it was one of those special moments in sports. I was sitting in my basement with my friends playing dominos and I looked up at a TV and saw what was happening and said, “Hold on, we gotta watch this!” I couldn’t believe my eyes.
Kobe has the mentality of a basketball serial killer. He’s going to come at you every single way possible and he’s not going to let up. His mentality — his killer instinct — is what separates him from the other guys on this list, because once Kobe knows he has you, he’s going to keep attacking you. He’ll throw you down, beat you up and even when you’re knocked out, he’ll keep hitting you.
Kobe wants to destroy his opponent every night, and his desire to do so is second only to Jordan. I never had to play against Michael when he was with the Bulls, so Kobe is the closest I’ve come to facing that type of determination in my career.
One of the toughest games I remember playing against Kobe happened in Boston. I think he made seven or eight shots in a row on me. So we come into the huddle during a timeout and Coach is looking at me with a face that I knew meant he wanted me to switch off of Kobe. And the rest of the guys on the team could see what was happening and they were looking at me too. Finally they bring up that maybe we should switch and put a different guy on him, and I yelled, “Hell no! I’m going to guard him! I got this!”
He ended up missing the last nine shots of that game with me on him, and we won. But the stat sheet is still vivid in my mind. Kobe took 47 shots. Forty-seven. No one has ever taken 47 shots on me. Most games a team will get up 81 to 89 shots.
What you have to understand about Kobe’s game is that by taking that many shots, he’s meticulously wearing down the defender until he breaks them. He’s made a career out of making guys lose confidence in their defense and then continuing to attack them. He’s won five rings doing that.
If you want to have any defensive success against Kobe, you can’t break. That’s much easier said than done."
