On the Court With... Kobe Bryant (12 page)

Anticipation for yet another stellar season was high in the wake of the Lakers’ three-peat. But unfortunately, some of the
team’s top players, including Shaq, were sidelined early with injuries and penalties. Indeed, if not for Kobe Bryant, the
Lakers might have faded into the background in the fall of 2002.

But Bryant wasn’t about to let that happen. Now entering his seventh season with the NBA, he was one of the most dominating
players on the court, and this year his deadly accuracy from the floor became even more threatening. In one game, he nailed
12 three-point shots, a new NBA high mark. He also posted a record-tying eight three-pointers in a single half; had a nine-game
streak of 40 or more points, tying Michael Jordan’s record; and a 13-game streak of 35 or more points, making him only the
fourth person to achieve that benchmark. But the highlight of his season came on March 5, 2003.

That night, the Lakers were playing the Pacers in Indiana. In the third quarter, Bryant got the ball and sailed into the air
for a hanging jump shot. The ball slipped into the net for two points. On the surface, it wasn’t a remarkable play—nothing
more than what he had done hundreds of times before.

But in fact, when that ball dropped through the hoop, Kobe Bryant made history. Those two points brought his career total
to 10,000, making him the youngest player in NBA history to reach that milestone.

Moments later, the crowd learned what he had done. They erupted with cheers and gave him a standing ovation.

“I really can’t grasp what it means right now,” Bryant said later. “I had no idea the crowd was going to stand up the way
they did. It was a little embarrassing, but it was a good feeling.”

Bryant continued to feel good and, along with Shaq and the other Lakers, to play great for the rest of the season. Los Angeles
ended with a 50-32 record, good enough to put them in the playoffs for the fourth year in a row. They dispatched their competition
there and reached the semifinals, where they faced the San
Antonio Spurs. After four games, the series was tied at two apiece.

Game five was a hard-fought battle that found the Lakers down by three in the final seconds. Unbelievably, they nearly sent
the game into overtime when Robert Horry tossed up a three pointer with 4.3 seconds left on the clock. The ball bounced in,
and then inexplicably bounced out of the hoop. The Spurs took that game, and the next as well—and for the first time in the
new millennium, the Lakers were out of the Championships.

The following year, Bryant posted numbers that were slightly lower than the previous years. Still, his stats were outstanding;
with a per-game average of 24 points, 5.5 rebounds, and 5.1 assists, he was among the top players in the league. Following
his sixth straight appearance at the All-Star Game, he added his ninth career triple-double, with 25 points, 14 rebounds,
and 10 assists, in a game against the Washington Wizards.

Los Angeles roared into the playoffs again in 2004 by winning 14 of their last 17 games. They then charged past the Houston
Rockets, the San Antonio Spurs, and the Minnesota Timberwolves to face the
Detroit Pistons in the finals. Once there, however, they seemed to run out of steam. The Pistons outplayed and outshot the
Lakers four out of the five contests. In game three, they embarrassed the LA team by beating them by a 20 point margin!

In years past, such a loss would have been unthinkable. But that loss wasn’t the only one the Lakers would suffer. In the
following season, they took to the courts with a big hole in their roster. After eight amazing seasons, Shaquille O’Neal had
been traded to the Miami Heat. Rumors swirled that the change had come at his request, made after Phil Jackson announced his
decision not to return as the Lakers’ coach in the fall of 2004. Others claimed Shaq was tired of competing with Kobe. Still
others said Kobe pushed Shaq out, a rumor that gained momentum when his new seven-year, $136.4 million contract was announced.

In the end, however, the reasons didn’t matter so much as the result—Shaq was gone. Competitors even when they were teammates,
Kobe and Shaq would now be in true competition whenever they met on the court.

Fans looked forward to that first meeting, slated
for Christmas Day, with great eagerness. The media hyped the event for weeks; when the Heat and theLakers took to the court,
it was before a record-setting audience.

By all accounts, the Kobe-Shaq duel lived up to its hype. Shaq and the Heat won the game in overtime, with Shaq posting a
double-double with 24 points and 11 rebounds. But Shaq also fouled out, his last two penalties given when he tried to block
Kobe’s drives to the hoop. Kobe, meanwhile, drained in a game-high 42 points and nearly won the game for the Lakers with a
close-but-no-cigar three pointer at the overtime buzzer.

“I had a pretty good look,” Bryant said of that last shot, “but I didn’t get the balance I would have liked.”

In the weeks following that ballyhooed match, Kobe and the Lakers often found themselves off-balance. On January 13, Bryant
suffered a severe sprain to his right ankle, an injury that sidelined him for a month. Then, midway through his recovery,
head coach Rudy Tomjanovich announced that he was stepping down for health reasons. Assistant coach Frank Hamblen worked his
team as best he could, but in the end, his leadership couldn’t overcome the
problems the Lakers were having. The season ended with LA missing a berth in the playoffs for the first time since 1994.

Kobe Bryant was disappointed with the results but had one high point to look back on. In the season’s final game, he chalked
up his 14,000th point, surpassing Michael Jordan as the youngest player to reach that benchmark. Still, he would have traded
that milestone for a chance to win another Championship ring.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
2005-2006

Kobe Bryant worked out throughout the off season to improve his speed and agility. When he returned to the court at the start
of the 2005-2006 season, it was obvious to everyone that his efforts had paid off. He scored 20 or more points in six of the
eight preseason games, and then exploded in the first regular season games, posting nine games with 30 or more points, including
two with more than 40! And on December 20, he was nearly unstoppable as he made shot after shot for 62 points, his best ever
game.

But even Kobe couldn’t have anticipated what would happen on January 22, 2006. That night, the Lakers faced the Toronto Raptors
in Los Angeles. Two minutes into the game, Bryant made a reverse layup for two points. Thirty seconds later, he added two
more on a fadeaway. He didn’t score again for four minutes, but by the end of the first period he had earned 14 points,
four of which came from free throws. Good numbers, but not unusual for him and not enough to help the Lakers overcome the
Raptor’s seven-point lead.

By halftime, he had a total of 26 points and seemed on his way to yet another 40-or-more point game. Then came the second
half.

After missing two jump shots in the opening minutes, Bryant hit eight in a row, including three three pointers! He added another
point with a free throw to bring his game total to 44—and then proceeded to sink virtually ever shot in the remainder of the
game. When the dust finally settled, Bryant had made a grand total of 81 points!

“Not even in my dreams,” Kobe said of his amazing achievement. “This was something that just happened. It is tough to explain.
It is just one of those things.”

That total of 81 points included 7 three pointers and was second only to the individual all-time high score of 100, made by
Wilt Chamberlain in 1962. Not surprisingly, the Lakers took the game, 122 to 104.

They took enough additional games in the remainder of the season to push them into the playoffs, too. Kobe had several more
40-plus point games and two 50-plus games during the final months.

Then came the first round of the playoffs, against the Phoenix Suns. The Lakers dropped the opening game, 107 to 102, then
took the next three to go ahead three games to one. The most remarkable play during those games came from Kobe Bryant in the
final seconds of the third game.

The Lakers were behind by two points. With the shot clock at 0.4, teammate Smush Parker got the ball. He passed it to Bryant.
With seven-tenths of a second left, Bryant drove to the hoop and laid the ball up.

Swish!

The ball dropped, the buzzer sounded, and the game was tied! Overtime!

“It was the most fun shot I’ve ever hit,” Bryant later commented.

And it wasn’t the last game-saver he made that night. As the overtime wound down into the final seconds, Los Angeles trailed
Phoenix by one. When the Suns’ Steve Nash got possession of the ball, the game seemed over. Then, incredibly, Laker Luke Walton
stole the ball!

Once again, Kobe Bryant was the go-to man. As the clock ticked down to the final second, he tossed up a jumper from seventeen
feet away. It hit! The Lakers
won, 99-98.

Los Angeles was up three games to one in a series marked by its rough-and-tumble play. They needed only one more to eliminate
the Suns. They didn’t get it.

Instead, Phoenix annihilated them, winning-the final three games—the last by a margin of 31 points! Kobe delivered a disappointing
performance that outing, adding only a single point in the second half and shooting only three times.

“They stepped up to the challenge and kept coming at us in waves,” he said after the elimination. “We just didn’t have enough
in the tank to hold on.”

Still, Kobe had much to celebrate at the end of his tenth NBA season. He had his best-ever points-per game average, with 35.4,
making him the league leader in that category. He had six 50-or-better point games, including his amazing 81-point game. Thanks
to “the Shot"—the overtime buzzer-beater that handed the Lakers the win in Game Four of the 2006 playoffs—he had a place in
basketball film history.

As gratifying as such moments were, however, they meant nothing to Bryant unless they factored into the greatest moment of
all: victory in the NBA Finals. That was a moment that had eluded Kobe since 2002.
It was one he wanted to relive again—soon.

But would the 2006-2007 season give him what he longed for, or would it end in disappointment as the previous four had?

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
2006-2007