Board Thread:Naruto Discussions/@comment-24347194-20150211225344/@comment-26302001-20150220040335

Itachi only said that in order to discourage Kisame. His only goal there was to check-up on Sasuke and even Naruto and nothing else. Itachi being deathly ill had a 35.5 just like Jiraiya who was not deathly ill at all and those are also base stats btw.. they were both 5th tier in a lot of scores.