It’s always been easier to explain the simple appeal of Kobe Bryant than it has been to articulate his complicated reality.
Basketball is the most cinematic of America’s four major sports. It has the broadest international reach and the biggest cultural hold on the zeitgeist.
Names like LeBron James, Allen Iverson and Michael Jordan reverberate around the world much louder than Albert Pujols, Peyton Manning and Alexander Ovechkin.
Plenty of non-basketball sports fans in Australia would know the names of Chris Bosh or Damian Lillard, players outside the NBA’s top ten. But how many do you know who could tell you who Matt Harvey or Earl Thomas are, players of comparable stature in baseball and the NFL?
So much of basketball’s appeal is tied up in the theatrical. The dunks, the crossovers, the half-court shots, the buzzer-beaters. These are elements of theatre that are accessible to every sports fan. The art of a well-timed slant route or an opposite-field double just aren’t nearly as magnificent to the naked eye.
We also love basketball for its mythology, and its penchant for creating stars and heroes. The individual is diluted in baseball and football with the amount of players on the field at all times. Basketball is different. There are only ten players on the court, and one player is powerful enough to dictate the outcome of a game, a series, or even a season.
That’s why we’re drawn to the individual in basketball. It’s so much easier to attach yourself to one man, than it is to a collection of men. The elite defence of the Seattle Seahawks is marvellous, but it’s far less tangible than the singular perfection of Stephen Curry’s release, something that anyone with a ball and a hoop can try and replicate, however wonderfully futile the exercise may be.
It’s for this reason that we deify basketball players as much as any athletes. We grow just as attached to the individual as we do to the team. They were never the ’80s Celtics or the ’90s Bulls – they were always the ‘Bird Celtics’ and the ‘Jordan Bulls’. Because we put halos on the stars of the NBA, because we want to see them touch God by themselves (or rather, perhaps, ‘touch Jordan’), we find it easier to condone the times that they go it alone, and turn a team sport into a platform for an individual. Because deep down we want the individual more than we want the team.
Deep down we want Kobe Bryant.
I guess we should have known. 60 points on 50 shots. It was the only way the Mamba was going to go out. For about three-and-a-half quarters, last week’s Lakers-Jazz season finale was a basketball farce. It was an exhibition game, a wonky, completely artificial stage for a player who hasn’t been good for three years to go out in a blaze of selfish glory.
Bryant’s teammates, many of them young players who need to develop by playing real basketball, looked for him every single time down the court, setting a record for moving screens in the process. It was as bizarre as it was uncomfortable.
And yet, my God, wasn’t it glorious?
There could have been no better game to surmise the basketball conundrum of Kobe Bryant. On one hand it was disgusting, watching a 37-year-old on a $25 million contract turn a game (and, really, a season) into a sideshow. But on the other hand it was beautiful, and ultimately harmless.
Bryant needed to have this performance. After the past three seasons, he needed to give this to the Lakers fans, to make everything that has transpired since the trades for Dwight Howard and Steve Nash moderately bearable.
Now, was Kobe’s commitment to gunning last Wednesday a selfless act? I doubt it, but we can live happily under the delusion if we want to.
The redeeming feature of the Kobe hijack was that he actually played a brilliant, and stunningly efficient game. He shot 44 per cent, got to the line 12 times, and despite having the ball in his hands on seemingly every possession, only turned the ball over twice. Getting 22 out of 50 doesn’t look overly impressive, but once you take out the ridiculous threes, Bryant shot a remarkable 16 for 29 from two-point range.
But what was most breathtaking about his performance was that for long periods of time he looked like Kobe Bryant again. For so long Bryant made a living out of taking impossible shots and seeing them swish. He made so many that we just grew accustomed to them going in. But in recent years, with his body having betrayed him, and no lift left in his battered legs, those shots starting doing what they always should have done, which was the most depressing thing of all. On Wednesday night though, they went in, and for fleeting moments it felt like 2006 again.
All night Bryant got to his spots, slithered through the mid-range and into the paint like only he can, and used his immaculate footwork to generate the slightest of openings where for others there can be none. It wasn’t perfect, with a number of ugly, ugly moments, mostly from deep. But when you’re committed to jacking 50 shots, you give yourself a certain margin for error.
And then there were the final minutes. Bryant has been legendarily overrated in the clutch, as any metric will tell you, and yet such is the force of his personality, the command of his stature, that you can’t help but feel that the numbers must be a lie.
Nobody will ever accuse Bryant of being fearful of the moment, and on Wednesday he rose to it in the most spectacular way possible. I’ve never seen an athlete look as spent as Bryant did in the final minutes against Utah. He could barely breathe. Some athletes look tired and gassed – Bryant looked like he needed to be hospitalised. But he found some extra gear, one likely reserved for only the most brilliant, demented competitors, and then all of a sudden you looked up and you realised: ‘Jesus Christ, the Lakers are going to win.’
In the week since ‘Mamba Out’, the NBA has rolled on, as it always does. The playoffs have begun, and with it comes the return of NBA minutiae, as magical as it is pedantic. Why won’t Dwayne Casey start Patrick Patterson? Why are the Pacers playing a single a minute without at least one of Paul George, Monta Ellis or George Hil on the floor? Will Billy Donovan ever start acting like a real head coach?
They’re all fascinating questions, yet they tend to feel somewhat insignificant in the grander scheme of things – the Mamba scheme of things.
Last Wednesday night the basketball world stood in awe of two events: Kobe Bryant’s final game and Golden State’s 73-win coronation. While Bryant was largely making a mockery of the ‘right way’ to play basketball, a little further north in California, the Warriors were playing the most beautiful team game, as they always do.
Bryant waved off teammates and took archaic long twos, while Golden State passed the ball with selfless purpose, launched wide-open shots from deep and lived at the rim, embracing modernity. While Bryant took 50 shots to get his 60, Curry only needed 24 to get 46.
And yet, when I look back on that historic Wednesday night, years from now, I know which warrior performance I’ll remember, and it’s not Golden State’s. It’s probably the ‘wrong’ one to remember, but to the bitter end, Kobe Bryant had a habit of making the wrong feel so damn right.
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