Kobe Bryant, Byron Scott Working to Revive Lakers' Championship Culture

Nobody logically believes the Los Angeles Lakers are going to win an NBA title this season, but that’s not stopping new coach Byron Scott and reigning franchise cornerstone Kobe Bryant from trying to revive a championship culture.

Is talking about it and doing it one and the same? Of course not, but it begins with restoring a belief system that has eroded in recent years.

The trophies in offices and banners on the wall may be inanimate reminders of better days, but they’re necessary with the human links having been winnowed away to the point of near extinction.

Scott and Bryant are undertaking the task of reinstalling Lakers culture back into Lakerland.

During the 2010-11 season, coaches and players on the Lakers roster held a total of 56 championship rings. That was Phil Jackson’s last year with the organization, and his departure led to a further exodus—assistant coaches were let go, and players were either traded over time or not brought back in free agency.

Four years later, Bryant is the only player on the roster with a tie to his team’s championship past, with five titles under his belt.

Scott has three rings from his days as a Showtime player, while assistant coach Mark Madsen won two as a player in L.A.

Apart from those in management, these three are the last living, breathing ties to a glorious tradition.

So yes, it is up to them.

Two weeks before training camp, Scott told Mark Medina for the Los Angeles Daily News:

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I’m going to walk into our locker room the first day of our meeting and say, ‘I want to win a championship.’ I don’t want us thinking it’s fine if we just make the playoffs or think we have no shot at making the playoffs. I don’t believe that. I want our guys to have the same mindset as I do.

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The mantra has remained consistent. At the end of the first week of camp, Scott sat down for an interview with Rick Fox and Reggie Miller for NBA TV and was asked what he had observed in the team the previous season while working as a TV analyst. Scott said it was a different philosophy from his earlier championship years with the organization:

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This team, this purple and gold, always thought about, and never, ever nothing less, but championships. That was our attitude every time we stepped on the floor. That was our attitude going into training camp, and I think we’ve lost that. We’ve lost that swagger, so to speak, in this organization. And, we’ve got to get that back.

In our first meeting Monday night, before we started Tuesday morning, I told everybody on this team, ‘you’d better start thinking like champions again.’ That’s the way I look at it, I know that’s the way number 24 looks at it, and we’ve got to get everybody to feel the same way. And when we change the attitude and the mindset, then we’ll start winning games. And I think that’s the most important thing.

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Bryant is indeed in lockstep with a new head coach who was also his earliest professional mentor. After Scott’s Showtime days were over, he moved on to play for the Indiana Pacers and Vancouver Grizzlies. For his final season, however, the shooting guard was brought back by the Lakers to guide a certain headstrong rookie sensation.

The two have been close ever since. Eighteen years later, they’re still on the same page. That includes not only speeches about championship aspirations, but actions.

While speaking to Fox and Miller for NBA TV, Bryant spoke about the physical nature of the hardest training camp he’s ever been in and Scott’s facetiously labeled “easy run”—a grueling drill aimed at improving conditioning.

When Fox asked how to get a young group of guys who’ve never experienced championships to buy into the mindset, Bryant responded:

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You set the tone the first day of practice. You can’t communicate that verbally, so Byron came out, the first 20 minutes of practice, and set the tone immediately by doing easy run for 20-something minutes. So now, all the silliness left practice, all the ‘we’re gonna come in here and do what we can.’ Because now it became a matter of survival. So when you come into practice now, you’re thinking about surviving. You have to have a serious focus about it because you know it’s going to be really challenging. And I think by doing that, that’s how you start changing the culture.

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While past eras may have proven more successful, there is still an unbroken time continuum—Scott’s championship days as a player led to his final season as a mentor, and Bryant’s rookie campaign segued into his own remarkable highs, followed by challenging lows and ultimately arriving here.

It is 18 years later, and Scott and Bryant have each come full circle once again—as coach and teammate to a new generation.

Heading into a final two-year contract extension, Bryant finds himself playing the same mentorship role once provided to him.

Per Eric Pincus of the Los Angeles Times, the veteran shooting guard described his commonality with Scott: "We see things the same way. In terms of philosophy, it's like identical."

Continuing the thread, Scott described a new role for a five-time champion approaching his own end game: “I’m going to use him like he's another assistant coach. He sees things out there that's a little different than other people see."

Asked if Bryant could eventually make the jump to a coaching career, Scott answered, “No, he’s too tough. He’d probably be a whole lot more demanding than Pat Riley and myself.”

For now, the duo is using tough love and working together to revive a championship culture in Los Angeles.

Perhaps somewhere in time, after more banners have been hung, this same circular tradition will repeat once again, and a young player from this camp will have become a veteran mentor, or a veteran will have become a coach—keeping the championship flame alive and moving forward.