Kobe spent part of his postgame time lamenting that European basketball players are taught how to better use their skill set at a younger age, putting their development ahead of stateside players (some of whom don’t even play with a shot clock until college).

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“I just think European players are just way more skillful,” Bryant told ESPN LA on Friday night. “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.”

Part of teaching young players the “right” way to play, Bryant said, is getting rid of the greedy AAU culture, which he called “horrible” and “terrible.”

“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,” he said.

“When you have limitations and you understand your limitations and you stay within yourself, you can be great,” he continued.

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“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.”

Bryant, who grew up in Italy, never played AAU basketball — a factor in his development that he says might have changed the type of played he’d become. A reporter asked him how he’d be different if he’d played stateside.

“I probably wouldn’t be able to dribble with my left and shoot with my left and have good footwork,” he said.

The simplest way to fix it?

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

He was, however, quick to acknowledge that the culture of greed and commoditizing young, skilled players won’t necessarily be open to change.

“That’s a deep well because then you start cutting into people’s pockets. People get really upset when you start cutting into their pockets because all they do is try to profit off these poor kids. There’s no quick answer.”

Source: ESPN LA