Matt Barnes was a hard-nosed player who was a solid defender. He was the type of player you’d want on your team. He won the championship in 2017 in a limited role with the Golden State Warriors. Most people, however, remember him with the Los Angeles Lakers.
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Barnes recently spoke about Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan on the Club 520 podcast. He claimed these two players are the best two-way players in the history of the NBA.
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“That [Kobe] motherf***er can play defense, though,” Barnes said. “I also think maybe because the scoring overshadowed the kind of work he was putting on defense. You know what I mean? And I would agree. Yeah, I mean obviously I think younger in his career, as he was trying to get started, he was more locked in on D, cuz he had to be.
“And I think as the team kind of became his and he grew, he was still locking on D, but he went and got people like Ron Artest. He went and got people like me, like we used to really fight because Ron and I would take the best players.
“So we’d have to argue with bro like no, we got them bro, you save all that energy for offense, and we’ll handle this. But he was definitely a competitor. Playing against him for a long time and then playing on the same team as him, you just got to see a whole other side of just his dedication. And just how sick he was of trying to be the greatest.
“And he said, ‘MB, I got to get six.’ He’s like, ‘I got to be able to sit at that table with MJ.’ Like, he was so dead set on being able to get that one more ring so he could be in that table and that conversation with MJ. But he was a sicko when it came to just getting to it daily.
“I would put him and MJ as probably the best two-way players.”
(Starts 5:25)
What Barnes talked about is what separates Jordan and Kobe from most players in NBA history. They truly did dominate both ends of the floor, never taking a play off.
This mindset is sadly lacking in today’s NBA.
