Longtime NBA insider for ESPN Ramona Shelburne recalled an instance when Kobe Bryant spoke to her after the Los Angeles Lakers hired Mike Brown to be their head coach and implied he didn’t appreciate that he found out about the hiring from a story that Adrian Wojnarowski wrote for Yahoo.
The time Kobe Bryant told Ramona Shelburne that he should not be reading about the new Lakers' coach from Woj on Yahoo. Classic story.
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“I remember Adrian was at Yahoo, and he broke that Mike Brown was gonna be the Laker coach,” Shelburne said when reflecting on the exchange between her and Bryant. “He broke it, and Kobe — we were not email — we did not have that connection yet. But Kobe, the next time I saw him, he goes, ‘Hey — I should not be reading about our next coach on Yahoo. You guys step it up.'”
Interestingly, Wojnarowski — the man that wrote the aforementioned Yahoo piece — announced his retirement from the news-breaking industry earlier this month after what was an incredible career working for multiple media outlets.
Brown didn’t last as the head coach of the storied Lakers franchise for very long. He spent only one full season — the 2011-12 season — leading the team from the sidelines, and that campaign was shortened by a lockout.
With Brown holding the coaching reins, the Lakers won 41 of their 66 games during the 2011-12 regular season. Brown also helped Los Angeles win a playoff series, as the team eliminated the Denver Nuggets in seven games in the first round of the 2012 NBA Playoffs before they lost to the Oklahoma City Thunder in the following round.
After what was a moderately successful inaugural season as the head coach of the Lakers, Brown lasted just five games into the 2012-13 season before he was relieved of his duties. The Lakers got off to a poor start to the campaign, as they won just one of their first five games of the season.
Bryant’s playing career with the Lakers didn’t last much longer once Brown got fired from the Lakers. His final season in the NBA and with the storied franchise came in the 2015-16 season, when he averaged 17.6 points, 3.7 rebounds and 2.8 assists per game for a Lakers squad that won only 17 games all season.
He is one of the longest-tenured Lakers in the history of the franchise, as he spent 20 seasons playing for the Purple and Gold after he was drafted in the 1996 NBA Draft.
It’s poetic that after Bryant gave Shelburne some grief about finding out about Brown’s hiring in a piece that Wojnarowski wrote, as the two would go on to work together at ESPN.
