Smush Parker likely won’t be sending Kobe Bryant a Christmas card this year.
The former teammate of Smush on the Lakers, Kobe singled out the point guard as the epitome of how the team had surrounded him with sub-par talent in the past, Inside Hoops noted .
Following a game on Wednesday, Kobe Bryant got onto the topic of the 2005-06 Lakers team, one in which he was alone in a sea of mediocre, borderline NBA players. As he was talking about his new teammate, Steve Nash, Kobe lamented that he deserved the MVP award that season instead of Nash.
“I almost won an MVP with Smush Parker and Kwame Brown on my team,” Bryant said before Wednesday’s 93-75 exhibition loss to Portland. “I was shooting 45 times a game. What was I supposed to do? Pass it to Chris Mihm or Kwame Brown.”
Other players on Lakers’ roster that year included Brian Cook, Stanislav Medvedenko, Devean George and Parker, Mihm and Brown. Among all the players, Kobe seemed to single out Smush Parker.
Bryant said Parker was “the worst. He shouldn’t have been in the NBA but we were too cheap to pay for a point guard. So we let him walk on.”
Bad blood between Kobe and Smush Parker is nothing new, Bleacher Report noted :
Those two didn’t get along particularly well during their days together in LA, even though Smush—with his 11.5 points, 3.7 assists, 3.3 rebounds and 36.6 percent shooting from three—wasn’t even the worst of the dregs who populated the Lakers’ roster that year (I’m looking at you, Kwame/Devean George/Luke Walton). They were known to clash, at least in part because of Parker’s purported lack of commitment to the game.
Kobe will probably get the last laugh in this feud. The newly revamped Lakers are a major contender for the NBA title this year. Smush Parker most recently played in the Dominican Republic.
