Shane Battier has faced down some of the fiercest competitors in NBA history on the basketball court.
Appearing as a guest on Pablo Torre Finds Out on Thursday, Battier broke down the work, and terror, that went into guarding the best of the best, including Kobe Bryant.
“I played against the greatest players of my generation, and I miss that anxiety. Guarding Kobe Bryant is f------ scary. I never will forget the feeling of getting on the bus at the Marina Del Rey Ritz—it’s a 45 minute ride to the Staples Center—and I’m just thinking to myself, ‘S---, this guy is trying to embarrass me. He wants to score 80 points on me tonight.’”
.@ShaneBattier: "Guarding Kobe Bryant is f*cking scary. ... I'm just thinking to myself, 'Sh*t. This guy is trying to embarrass me. ... He wants to score 80 points on me tonight.' That anxiety was real." 😂 pic.twitter.com/auUb6NwrVt
— Pablo Torre Finds Out (@pablofindsout) June 5, 2025
But rather than let the fear that the likes of Kobe put in his heart demoralize him, Battier used it as fuel, working hard to better understand his opposition.
“That anxiety was real. I call it productive paranoia. Instead of being paralyzing, I used that to be like, man, I better know everything about Kobe that there is to know about him. I threw myself into data analytics and just learned Kobe better than Kobe knew himself. It allowed me to stay in the game. I understood, okay, I’m not going to stop these guys, but I can be a human yellow light, and slow them down a little bit. Just be the human yellow light.”
Essentially Battier’s strategy for defending the GOATs came down to, “You cannot stop Kobe Bryant, you can only hope to contain him.”
While it might not be the logic you’d expect from an NBA competitor, it sure worked for Battier, who spent 14 years in the league as a pro.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Shane Battier Breaks Down What Made Guarding Kobe Bryant So Terrifying.
