Nick Young isn’t exactly the shining beacon of knowledge that you’d go to ask for basketball wisdom, but he’s quite a fun person to interview and squeeze juicy quotes from. He recently told Marc J. Spears of the Undefeated how he felt about his fit with his new team, the Golden State Warriors, compared to his time with the Los Angeles Lakers.
“Like Kobe, it’s a totally different set of stars,” Young said. “Kobe, you had to say, ‘What’s up?’ to him and talk to him. He was very standoffish. But these guys, once I came in, were already all jelling. It was kind of like family.”
Nick Young played for four seasons with the Lakers and three with Bryant, so what he told Spears carries value. None of those years resulted in a playoff appearance for the storied franchise, so Young hooking up with a championship contender like Golden State must have felt like a rebirth for him.
Bryant was always known to be too focused on winning and being the focal point of the Lakers’ offense during his playing days that it affected his image as a teammate. And as Young observed, the Warriors have a much different playing atmosphere, not just because the guys on the team are already talented, but also because Golden State's ecosystem is free of toxic intra-rivalries and egotistic individuals.
Nothing better describes how welcome Nick Young is feeling playing for the Warriors than his 23-point outburst right in his very first game in Golden State threads, albeit in a 122-121 loss to the Houston Rockets in the season opener.
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