Kobe Bryant: 5 best moments of his glorious career

End of an eraAt around 4 pm Pacific Time, Twitter became abuzz with an announcement that was neither surprising nor a particularly happy one for any fan of the NBA when Kobe Bryant announced that he would be retiring from the NBA at the end of the season.Kobe will go down as a top 5-8 player in the history of the game, depending on how you want to rank players in your subjective rankings, but this isn’t so much about rankings as much as a remembrance of a career that was as polarizing as it was great, as stubborn as much as it was about perseverance.Kobe has played basketball for as long as I can remember, I’m only 24, and even though this year is nowhere near anything we’ve ever seen from Kobe and I spent most of my formative years disliking him (I’m a Kings fan so he ripped my heart out many times), I will always remember the competitor, the guy who would never let any injury derail him, and also the guy who never met a shot he didn’t like. This is a celebration of a great career and all the fun times I had watching Kobe “Bean” Bryant take the hardwood night in and night out.

#1 Kobe arrives

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June 4, 2000, the legend of Kobe Bryant, superstar, was born. The Lakers were staring at their first three-game losing streak of the season, a losing streak that would end their season in the Western Conference Finals, short of what seemed like a destined trip to the NBA Finals.

As the Lakers went into the fourth quarter, they were trailing the Portland Trail Blazers 71-58 and it looked like they were going to fall short yet again, especially when the lead quickly swelled to 15 early in the fourth.

When things looked especially grim, Kobe and Shaquille O’Neal came alive and began leading a spirited comeback as the Lakers fought back from their deficit to bring themselves within striking distance of the lead.

As the game pushed late into the fourth quarter, the Lakers were finally able to take the lead and with just over 40 seconds left and the Lakers up 83-79, Kobe lofted a pass towards the basket that seemed like it was surely going to miss its target.

Except, the only other person who could have been on the same wavelength as the young Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal flew into the picture and finished off the alley-oop to put the Lakers ahead by six, effectively ending the game and sending Kobe to the first of his seven NBA Finals.

With this pass and this game, Kobe showed to the world that all the immense expectations we had of him were spot on. We are always saying that players are too young to be expected to step up in big playoff games, that the moment will be too great for them and we need to wait for them to get seasoned by the playoff fire, but Kobe, at the ripe age of 21, showed he was more than ready for the big stage.

The pass was just the cherry on top of a magnificent game played under the highest pressure, his first playoff masterpiece where he only sat out one minute of game time and led the Lakers in all of these categories: points (25), rebounds (11), assists (7), blocks (4).

#2 Kobe, the destroyer of worlds

In the 2001-02 season, Kobe played a mind-boggling 80 games

A little less than a year later, the Lakers were in the midst of what would go down as quite possibly the greatest playoff run in the history of the league. In a postseason where they would finish as back to back champions, they compiled a 15-1 record, including three series wins in the West, all against teams with more than 50 wins.

In no game did Kobe’s star shine brighter than in game 4 of the Western Conference Semifinals against the Sacramento Kings, a game that very well could be his best in the playoffs.

It was a tight game throughout, that even saw the Kings take the lead going into the fourth quarter by four points, hoping to live to fight another day against the Lakers juggernaut.

However, with Shaq fighting constant foul trouble all game, leading to him eventually fouling out with three minutes left in the game, Kobe had other plans about how the game would go. He unleashed a 48 point, 16 rebound tour de force, while getting to the line a whopping 19 times, making 17 of them, and playing every minute of the game.

If the year before had announced Kobe as the next NBA superstar, this game showed that superstar was here to rip your heart out and take names, not merely win the game.

On this afternoon, Kobe put the league (and his team) on notice that there would be no nights off from his wrath, that his competitiveness burned so deep that it was not ok to accept a loss and go back home to clinch the series.

Kobe showed that if he was stepping on to the court, he was going to accept nothing less than total victory, and he was going to be the guy who delivered it. On this afternoon, he reached heights only experienced by the greatest of the NBA greats and added another chapter to what was becoming a growing legacy.

#3 This dude can score (month version)

Kobe made history in February 2003 with his scoring numbers

The year was 2003, the month was February, and Kobe Bryant was about to unleash one of the greatest scoring months known to man. By the time he was done with the month, he threw up the ridiculous scoring line of 40.6 points per game on 47% shooting, while getting to the line an insane 12.5 times a game.

He dropped ten 40-point games in 14 games during the month, including nine straight 40 plus games. For good measure, he threw in two 50-pointers and never saw himself score below 30 points.

This was the month that made some people say, “Maybe these Michael Jordan scoring comparisons are quite as far-fetched as they may have seemed.” If you remember this streak, you remember what it was like to have to get on the internet or watch Sportscenter at the end of the night, just to see if he could keep the 40 point streak going.

It was unlike anything a person my age had ever seen and really a scoring feat only matched by Michael Jordan since the 1976 NBA-ABA merger. It was unreal, unfathomable, and any other superlative you want to throw out there. It was the Black Mamba before you knew what the Black Mamba was.

Even as I was deep in the midst of my Kobe and Laker hatred, I just couldn’t take my eyes off of how dominant this guy was when it came to putting the ball in the basket. It was crazy to watch NBA defenses, who knew the night before that Kobe could breathe fire, get torched nonetheless like they were an outmatched high school team.

When the month finally ended and he went back to scoring a “mere” 28 points a game in March, you could look back on February and smile, knowing you witnessed history.

#4 This dude can score (game version)

The highest single-game score since 1978

46. No, that’s not the number of points Kobe had on January 22, 2006, that’s the number of shots he took. Because on this day in NBA history, we saw a man drop 81 points, 66% of his teams total, in a single game.

Now while this wasn’t the record for points in a game, in today’s modern NBA, it was the highest point total since 1978 and the second-most points anyone had ever scored in an NBA game. And what made it even better was that he did it during a game where he had to lead the Lakers back from an early deficit.

So many times in his career, Kobe has been accused of shot and point chasing, some rightful, others not, but on this Sunday night, he simply did what he had to do to lead his team to victory.

Are you really going to tell someone who is shooting 60% to stop shooting, even as they are taking the lion’s share of the shots? I sure as hell wouldn’t because in the end, you want to win and if that is on the lapels of one man, then by all means, ride those lapels.

When you have a sorry team, the Lakers started Smush Parker, Kwame Browne, and Chris Mihm that game, and you are down by 14 at halftime, is Kobe supposed to pass the ball equally when he’s in epic form? Of course not, you let him shoot as much as he can, and shoot he did.

He scored 55 points in the second half for Christ’s sake. It might have been the most “Kobe” game ever, carrying a subpar team to heights it could never reach, one jumper or pump fake up and under at a time.

Even if you want to get on Kobe for not passing as much as you’d like during his career (guilty as charged), you cannot, as an NBA fan, sit back with a straight face and criticize the man on a night like this.

#5 Kobe is a tough SOB

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The final date in the Kobe annals for me is April 12, 2013, or more known as the date Kobe stopped being Kobe. It was here, where a stirring run of unforgettable performances that pushed an underwhelming star-studded Laker squad into the playoffs was cut short by the worst injury to befall an aging basketball player.

Kobe tore his Achilles tendon at the end of a stirring 118-116 victory over the Golden State Warriors and we would never see the same Kobe Bryant again.

Now if we just stopped here and recited his stat line, 34 points, 5 rebounds, 4 assists, 12-16 from the free throw line, you could walk away marvelling that a 34-year-old man with 17 years under his belt could still put up a stat line like this at the end of the season.

But that is not the thing that made Kobe great on this night. Rather, after tearing his Achilles tendon and being barely able to stand, much less walk under his own power, there was Kobe “Bean” Bryant, slowly limping to the free throw line to finish off the foul shots he earned when the injury occurred.

The man who had endured countless injuries and kept playing was now about to shoot two free throws all while not being able to use his right foot to push off whatsoever.

Naturally, he drained both of them before the Lakers fouled and Kobe exited the game, leaving us all to wonder how hurt he was because Kobe never, I repeat, never left a game this close because of injury.

When it came out after the game that Kobe had indeed suffered an Achilles tear, all the basketball world could do was look back and with mouths agape at how this guy had defied the laws of injuries again.

Yeah, maybe he wasn’t the best team player or leader all the time, but the thing that will stick out to me most when I remember Kobe’s career will be the toughness he displayed time and again, both against physical and mental pains, with this final night being the at the forefront of those memories.

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Edited by Staff Editor