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Kobe Bryant Revealed Steph Curry’s Secret Once, “A Problem”

by in Sports | May 1, 2023

Kobe Bryant

Kobe Bryant, photo: Gamerscore Blog from USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Basketball and mindset-preparation legend Kobe Bryant was a font of wisdom for many younger NBA players who followed him, becoming a guru for the many contemporary stars who still shout out his name in interviews. Bryant, who died tragically not long after he retired from the game, left a legacy of how-to advice about the Mamba Mentality that he used to achieve success — and a watchful NBA fan can see the results of Bryant’s bequest all over the league.

Bryant was as athletic as they come, yet still managed to win even higher praise for his cerebral ways on the hardwood. Bryant recognized similar qualities in 2x NBA MVP Stephen Curry — and Bryant, given his stature, was in a unique position to describe what he saw.

With Bryant and Curry it was a case of, as they say, game recognize game.

So after Stephen Curry stamped his name into the NBA record books AGAIN, becoming the only player to score 50 points in a Game 7, people searching for ways to explain Curry’s exceptional play and ability to rise to the occasion were reminded of Kobe Bryant’s assessment of the “Baby-Faced Assassin,” as Curry had been called earlier in his career — before the beard!

Bryant said it was an eerie calmness that Curry displayed which created a “major problem” for his opponents. It is something that even very few NBA players understood, Bryant said.

Head Coach Steve Kerr has run out of superlatives to describe Curry, so he has resorted to the highest praise possible — he says Curry is just like Michael Jordan, with whom Kerr played and won titles. Jordan, of course, was Kobe Bryant’s mentor. The calmness Bryant describes was well-known to all three stars.