Agitated by U.S. teammate Kobe Bryant’s selfish play leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, LeBron James urged Coach Mike Krzyzewski to remedy the problem in the severest of terms, according to a new book.
The resentment came to a head when Bryant took low-percentage shots in an exhibition against Australia.
“Players can police themselves, but in this instance, as LeBron was coming out of the game, he said to Mike, ‘Yo, Coach, you’d better fix that motherfucker,’ as he walked by,” a team staffer said in Ian O’Connor’s “Coach K: The Rise and Reign of Mike Krzyzewski,” an advance copy of which was obtained by HuffPost. “He was talking about Kobe.”
Krzyzewski followed up. The book says he met with Bryant privately and showed him clips of his “bullshit shots,” telling Bryant, “There has to be more movement.”
“Bryant just looked right at him and said, ‘I got it, Coach. I got it. Don’t worry about it. Sorry about that.’”
The U.S. would go on to win the gold medal. Bryant and James were also teammates on the 2012 Olympics team that won in London.
James later expressed regret that when he joined the Lakers in 2018, two years after Bryant had retired, a planned meeting with the former Lakers great never happened.
“Of course, you think there’s going to be time for us to get together and I understand that there are regrets in life, but I definitely wish I had that moment with him,” James told Yahoo Sports. “I do remember when I decided to come here, he sent me a text right away and said, ‘Welcome, brother. Welcome to the family.’”
Bryant died in a January 2020 helicopter crash.