Basketball Tip

Kobe Bryant Credits Skill Development and Fundamentals For His Success, Rips AAU

Here are Kobe's comments:

"I just think European players are just way more skillful," Bryant said Friday night after the Los Angeles Lakers' 109-106 loss to the Memphis Grizzlies. "They are just taught the game the right way at an early age. ... They're more skillful. It's something we really have to fix. We really have to address that. We have to teach our kids to play the right way."

"AAU basketball," Bryant said. "Horrible, terrible AAU basketball. It's stupid. It doesn't teach our kids how to play the game at all so you wind up having players that are big and they bring it up and they do all this fancy crap and they don't know how to post. They don't know the fundamentals of the game. It's stupid."

"When you have limitations and you understand your limitations and you stay within yourself, you can be great," Kobe Bryant said. "You know what you can do and what you can't do. In America, it's a big problem for us because we're not teaching players how to play all-around basketball. That's why you have Pau and Marc [Gasol], and that's the reason why 90 percent of the Spurs' roster is European players, because they have more skill."

"Teach players the game at an early age and stop treating them like cash cows for everyone to profit off of," he said. "That's how you do that. You have to teach them the game. Give them instruction."

Here is a link to the rest of the article: http://espn.go.com/los-angeles/nba/story/_/id/12114523/kobe-bryant-says-european-players-more-skilled-americans-blames-aau

Per ESPN