Robert Horry: Rudy T best coach, not Phil J or Gregg Pop. Kobe hardest worker.

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Here are a few things I think: Brent Barry was one of the smartest players I ever played with in the NBA. Rudy Tomjanovich was the best coach I ever had, not Phil Jackson or Gregg Popovich. Kobe Bryant was the hardest working player I ever played with. The Triangle is just a fancy name for the same plays that 50 percent of the NBA runs. Dennis Rodman was a genius. Basketball is a ruthless business. Winners don’t take no shite.

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I’ll give you another example. When I got traded to the Lakers in ’97, Kobe Bryant was just a rookie. The dude couldn’t shoot threes. We would play this shooting game every day after practice. It was me, Kobe, Brian Shaw, Mitch Richmond and Kurt Rambis. Kobe would lose every time. We would get to practice the next day and sure enough, Kobe would already be there shooting nothing but threes. Like clockwork, at the end of practice he’d say, “Let’s play the game! I’m ready for you.” And we would beat his arse again.

He would never stop. It was incredible. He practiced until one day, a couple months later, he finally won. If you literally said, “Kobe, I bet you can’t make five in a row by dropping the ball and kicking it in from half court,” that motherfricker would go out there and practice it until he could do it. And that’s what people don’t understand when they talk about champions — when they talk about a winner’s mentality. Kobe’s dedication to the game is unreal. And I mean that in the truest sense … it was literally unbelievable. The common denominator in every championship team is the mentality that Kobe has, and the mentality that Hakeem had with me at that Christmas party. You have to be so obsessed with winning that you pull no punches with your teammates, even when you’re in first place. Even when you’re a defending champ.

Whenever I hear people crying about Kobe yelling at people in practice, or wondering whether or not LeBron is best friends with his teammates, I just roll my eyes. You know how many off-court conversations I had with the Zen-Master Phil Jackson in my entire time with the Lakers? One. I was sitting in the trainer’s room getting treatment and he was sitting on the table across from me.

“What happened with you and Danny Ainge in Phoenix?” he asked.

“I didn’t like him, so I blew up and threw a towel at him. I didn’t handle it the right way.”

“Okay.”

And that was it. We won three titles together. Go figure.

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The polar opposite of that was my relationship with Rudy T. He understood that even though he was the coach, we could see things that he couldn’t see from the bench. We could hear things and feel things on the court that he couldn’t see. First thing T would say was, “What’s going on out there?” He would ask us the plays we would want to run sometimes and get a feel for what we were comfortable with.

If we ran a play and it worked, T would tell us to run it again. Phil not so much. Same with Pop. They are both great in their own right, but based on personal experience, T was the greatest NBA coach. I know he doesn’t have nearly as many championships, but sometimes we give one person too much credit for titles.

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