Edgy Kobe gave way to Amused Kobe.

Better yet, Bemused Kobe.

Kobe Bryant, skilled at measuring a mood, admitted he was even surprised by the level of panic in Los Angeles after the Lakers dropped their first two games of the regular season.

So much so that he used a variety of descriptive words in his media session Thursday, among them, “dumb,” “stupid,” “idiotic,” “urgency,” and “amnesia.”


(For the record, those were not descriptions of the Princeton Offense).

“I’m always surprised when I lose,” Bryant said after practice. “At the same time it [the panic] is pretty entertaining to me. Nobody wants to win here more than I do. Nobody. Nobody.

“And I’m not panicking over it. Or jumping off a bridge because we’re 0-2 or whatever.”

He offered an interesting response to the growing cry around the city, that the offense be scraped.


“I just ... I don’t understand ... the city here ... for me not trying to bite my tongue and not calling them dumb, which I kinda just did,” Bryant said.

“They’ve seen us win multiple championships here, playing an offense that was tough to learn, that was a sequence of options that weren’t set plays that took five guys being on the same page of working together.

“They know how that stuff works. For them to be so stupid now.

“They say, ‘Well, let Steve [Nash] dribble the ball around and create opportunities for everybody. And let Dwight [Howard] post up and let me iso.’ It’s ... I don’t want to say idiotic, but it’s close.”


He got off a good line about Lakers Coach Mike Brown and former coach Phil Jackson.

“Now you have Mike Brown telling everybody to be patient,” Bryant said. “Back then, it was Phil Jackson telling everybody to shut up.

“The critics are more likely to take runs at him [Brown] than they would at Phil Jackson.”

Now Bryant can be the one to ask for silence.


“Yeah because I’ve won, so I can,” Bryant said. “Mike, it would be a little tougher for him to say that. So I’ll say it for him: Everybody shut up. Let us work.”

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