Anyway, Gasol spoke English when he came to the U.S., the same way many people speak Spanish in the U.S., but he obviously didn’t speak it as fluently as he did Spanish, his first language. With that in mind, Kobe Bryant communicated with Gasol in Spanish when the Lakers traded for him in 2008, and it’s something Gasol told Omar Raja of ESPN he always appreciated about Bryant: “Right away from the first game he started speaking Spanish. On our coverages, on our plays. It was great. It was something that I obviously didn’t expect at the beginning, even though I knew that he spoke really good Italian because he spent quite a bit of time in Italy when his dad played there when he was young. “But then being married to Vanessa, she speaks Spanish very well (and) obviously he picked up some stuff. He was great, we did speak quite a bit of Spanish, especially our first years so that the opponents couldn’t understand. And they would point it out, they would go ‘what are you guys talking about?’ It was pretty funny … It created that bond and that relationship from the get go, and he set the tone.”