Shane Battier

Carmelo.

You name it.

I played against the greatest players of my generation, and I miss that anxiety.

Guarding Kobe Bryant is f***ing scary.

I never will forget the feeling of getting on the bus at the Marina Del Rey Ritz.

It's like a 45-minute ride to Staples Center.

I'm just thinking to myself, s***, this guy's trying to embarrass me.

I know he's lathered right now, and he wants to score 80 points on me tonight.

And so, like, that anxiety was real, right?

And so, I call it productive paranoia.

Instead of being, like, paralyzing, I use that to be like, man, I better know everything about Kobe that there is to know about him.

And so, that, like, I tried to learn and threw myself in the data analytics and just learned Kobe better than Kobe knew himself.

It allowed me to stay in the game.

And 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.

And that was my only goal, just be the human yellow light.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I guess.

I guess.

Is there an element of this that is teachable?

Yeah, because I had the answer to the test before I took it.

Like...