By Joël Pütz | Sports journalist
Quickly becoming a global superstar after his debut in the NBA, Kobe Bryant made a detour to French television sets in 1998. The opportunity for him to express himself honestly about the lockout then in place in the big league.
When you see the salaries of NBA players, it’s hard not to be dizzy. Stephen Curry earns more in one year than on the contract he signed in 2012 (48 million over four years), which was then said to be too expensive. What if we told you that Victor Wembanyama could become one of the first to receive a check… at $100 million per season? Or even a contract worth a billion greenbacks?
Suffice to say that the stars of the league are bathed in money more than ever and even the role players today receive insane amounts in the eyes of athletes ten or twenty years before them. The result of a process of balance of power which does not date from yesterday, since the league has often had to face a bloc of players united and ready to do anything to have better remuneration. Including not playing at all…
Still very young, Kobe Bryant honest about the 1999 lockout
Because in order to get what they want, the latter have not been afraid to resort to lockouts in the past, thus immobilizing the NBA. The last one took place in 2011-12, but the 1998-99 one is perhaps the most famous of all since the season only started in February. In August 1998, a certain Kobe Bryant had also broached the subject with George Eddy… in France, on the set of Canal+ Sport :
Kobe Bryant : You have to position yourself and analyze it from both points of view: I’m an NBA player, I’m a professional, it’s my job. But at the same time on the other side we say: “these guys are selfish, they ask for salaries that are too high, we already pay them way too much. » So we have to consider both points of view.
George Eddy : And the fans in there? They’re going to be a little angry with these billionaires fighting.
Kobe Bryant : At the moment it’s a real shame, because the NBA has really become a business now, a commercial business. We transformed basketball into an industry, but hey…
The Hall of Famer was still only 20 years old at the time, but he had clearly already understood very well the way the big league worked and the dilemmas that faced it and the players. It should also be noted that the shortened season that followed was not a great success for the Lakers and him, swept by the future champion Spurs in the Western Conference semi-finals. But the best was yet to come.
It didn’t take Kobe Bryant long to grasp the business side of basketball in the United States. Enough to allow him to later become a savvy businessman with a great fortune, at a time when salaries in the NBA were infinitely lower than those received by today’s players.
