Before games, Bryant slips in custom-made earpieces with "KB" monograms on each side. Then he turns on his DVD player and tries to find ways to take away comfort zones from opponents.
For the Christmas Day game against Boston, he received 12 edited minutes of three Celtics starters: Paul Pierce, Rajon Rondo and Ray Allen. Less than 48 hours later, he received 11 minutes of three Golden State players: Stephen Jackson, Kelenna Azubuike and Marco Belinelli.
"It's a blueprint," said Bryant, an eight-time member of the NBA all-defensive team. "So if something goes down, it's not something you haven't seen before. Everybody's got tendencies. If he scores 40 on Monday, he's going to try to do it on Tuesday. You've got to take him out of his spots. That's the key."
Bryant has studied basketball footage since he was a 6-year-old in Italy, where his father, Joe "Jellybean" Bryant, played professionally after an eight-year NBA career.
Bryant's grandfather would send video tapes to Italy of NBA games, and Bryant would eagerly pop them into the bulky tape machines of the 1980s. NBA games were not televised in Europe, so Bryant depended on the boxes from his grandfather to be able to imitate U.S. professionals.
"When I saw a hot move, I could rewind it and go back and watch it and learn from it," Bryant said. "It started real early."
It continued at Lower Merion (Pa.) High, where Bryant played high school basketball after his family moved to Philadelphia. Bryant said his high school coach, Gregg Downer, was a "big believer" in breaking down video.
"He had everybody watching game film even back then when it wasn't as popular to do it," Bryant said. "He would scout out our opponents' games, videotape our opponents' games, and we would watch game tape of them."
Bryant graduated from high school in 1996 and played his first NBA game as an 18-year-old, where his film fascination continued.
He asked Lakers video coordinators for tapes on players from the late 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s, including revered Chicago Bulls guard Michael Jordan.
When the Lakers hired Phil Jackson in 1999, Bryant was tipped off that his new coach sometimes asked video coordinators to edit random on-screen words into video packages viewed by the entire team before practice. Jackson would then ask a particular player which word just flashed on the screen, the equivalent of a pop quiz for multi-millionaire athletes.
