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Kobe Bryant
The Mamba gets it to go!
Here's another very interesting article about Kobe's last game in Philadelphia. This is his hometown, the place where he attended High School ... the place where it all began.
"Kobe Kicks Off Farewell Tour in Philadelphia, Right On Script."
PHILADELPHIA -- The ovation took his breath away like a gut punch -- "I wasn't expecting that," Kobe Bryant said -- and then came the roundhouse to the jaw: His high school coach Gregg Downer and the one and only Julius Erving presenting Bryant with a framed No. 24 Lower Merion High School jersey just before tipoff.
The city that loved to hate him all these years opened its arms and lungs and chanted his name Tuesday night -- a thundering chorus of "Ko-Be! Ko-Be!" rising toward the rafters in the old basketball building on Broad and Pattison, drowning out the celebration from thePhiladelphia 76ers' first victory after a 28-game losing streak.
Bryant couldn't remember the last time he and the Lakers lost a game here. I'll help. It was February 2012, when the Sixers still had a basketball team. On this night, when a woebegone, perennially rebuilding franchise finally won a game, the city was completely preoccupied.
Philly was busy saying hello and goodbye to one of its homegrown basketball legends all at the same time.
It was loud. It was raw. It was unsightly at times. And it was something to see and hear and feel -- unlike anything Bryant could have imagined when his retirement announcement crashed The Players' Tribune website on Sunday night.
"I can't script this stuff," Bryant said. "The amount of appreciation and admiration and respect I have for the city, and to be able to have this moment here, it just means everything to me. … It moved me beyond measure."
In a way, though, Bryant did script it. Well, not the part about the 103-91 loss to a team that was 0-18 and hadn't won a game since March. Not the part about his 7-for-26 shooting night, including 4-for-17 from 3-point range. You read that right, seventeen. Bryant came out and hit his first three shots, all from beyond the 3-point arc, and then proceeded to brick or airball 13 of the next 14.
Sixers coach Brett Brown, his belly filled with the fruits of victory after an interminable fast, noted that his young team was a bit shell-shocked to see Bryant come out like that.
"They were, they were," Bryant said.
What Bryant did script, and enjoyed to the bitter end and beyond, was the sendoff he'd so cleverly orchestrated by announcing his decision to retire after the season only 48 hours before taking the floor in his hometown, where they'd been booing him for 20 years.
"It just so happened to be this was the first road game," Bryant said, "which made it make even more sense."
But after all these years in the limelight, we all know Bryant is more calculating than that. For one, Sonny Hill knows, and wasn't afraid to share.
Hill is the ageless father of Philadelphia basketball, having raised Bryant from the time he was a cocksure 11-year-old in Hill's developmental league for sixth, seventh and eighth graders. The city's basketball family tree is rooted under Hill's feet -- from Wilt Chamberlain and Hal Greer, to Erving and the late Moses Malone (honored at halftime Tuesday night) to Bryant and Allen Iverson.
"This is his way, at the end, to say, 'Even though I'm a Laker, I know where it started,'" Hill told me before the game. "And if it were not for Philadelphia, then the likelihood of him being who he was? It wouldn't have happened."
"How so?" I asked.
"It's the competition," he said. "It's the way that he was able to grow up. It's the way that he was able to take the Philly game and take it to the suburbs. He didn't learn his basketball in Lower Merion. He learned his basketball in the Sonny Hill League."
"It's the end of his career," Hill said. "Where's his loyalty at the end of his career? Philadelphia. Why did he announce within the framework of when he'd be coming to Philadelphia that he's going to retire? You don't think that was planned?"
Of course it was.
What Bryant isn't sure how to anticipate now is getting through all the other farewells in other buildings that are meaningful to him -- Boston, San Antonio, Sacramento, Chicago -- and how to push his 37-year-old body through 65 more games.
Mostly losses, it would appear. Obscured by the Hollywood script that their season has become, this ode to Bryant, the Lakers are 2-15.
"For once in my career, I'll refrain from being such a control freak," Bryant said. "Just take it in, man, and just enjoy the process. … I'm not gonna save it for pickup basketball at Equinox in December. I'm gonna play. I'm not coming back to the venues anymore. So God-willing, if I'm healthy and I can walk and run, my butt will be out there."
The scene was moving, Bryant's words sincere. But the Lakers' predicament is unbecoming a franchise that's won 16 championships -- five of them with Bryant.
If the Sixers are tanking, then what are the Lakers doing? With every loss, they cling ever tighter to their precious 2016 first-round pick, which goes to the Sixers if it falls out of the top three. At least Bryant's last lap around the NBA makes good postgame fodder for Time Warner Cable SportsNet -- and for Bryant's documentary.
One thing is certain: Byron Scott isn't directing any of it. Nobody is listening to him anymore, and I didn't even see him stand up once the entire game, except during timeouts. I guess that just means I'm ignorant about what Scott's purpose is, which is to sit idly by while Bryant launches one errant shot after another after another -- at one point, an early-in-the-shot-clock 3 on the next possession after an airball.
"If you're gonna win championships, if you want to be a champion inside and out, you've got to roll with the punches," Bryant said. "You can't run from the very, very tough times. You can't run from the criticism. You can't run from the fact that you're not playing as well as you want to be playing. You've got to stand up and face that stuff, just as you would when everybody's singing your praises and you're winning championships and everything's fine."
The sting from Bryant's latest barrage of misses -- he's now shooting 30 percent for the season -- was overwhelmed by the pageantry of his farewell. All these years in Hollywood have taught him something.
He sensed the fear in his star-struck opponents when he came out and hit those first three shots -- a 3-pointer off a curl, another off a crossover dribble that wowed the crowd and another off an offensive rebound that was tapped out to him.
He shared a laugh with undrafted rookie T.J. McConnell when they lined up for a jump ball in the fourth quarter, the Sixers clinging to a lead they would actually hold.
"We line up and he goes, 'I cannot believe I'm about to line up and jump ball with you right now,'" Bryant said. "'This is crazy!' When you have moments like that, man, you can't help but laugh."
He waxed poetic about his old battles with Iverson, "the most competitive player on the face of the Earth, no question," he said.
"He'd attack from the beginning of the game to the end of the game, and he was a player that I always had to pay attention to," Bryant said. "He always had me on my toes. There's not another player that did that. He kept coming."
Bryant keeps coming now, keeps attacking with no conscience or shame, keeps being who he's always been right to the bitter end. It made me think of something Hill had said to me before the game, when I asked how the retirement announcement and this emotional goodbye to his hometown would affect Bryant.
"It'll be interesting to see which Kobe comes out tonight," Hill said. "Is he going to come out tonight and try to give Philadelphia that last shot of what Kobe was? Or is he going to come out and say, 'I'm from Philadelphia. I'm going to play basketball.' Get a shot here, get a pass here, whatever it may be."
"What do you think?" I asked.
"I think we're going to get the Kobe that knows how to play Philadelphia basketball," he said. "That doesn't mean you don't have to score. But it means that you know how to play basketball because he's been taught how to play basketball."
When Bryant finished up in the interview room -- filled with reporters and, oddly, some fans -- he said, "Thank you guys, man. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. You guys have been tough and I absolutely love it. Thank you guys, and much, much love."
And as he darted into a hallway leading to the Sixers' locker room, down a hallway and out into the chilly Philadelphia night, I wondered if this is the way he really wanted to go out.
SOURCE - CSB Sports.
Ken Birger NBA Insider.
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You can't make this stuff up...
ReplyDelete"I'm taking my talents to the NBA" with his sunglasses
ReplyDeleteOne of the greatest of all time. Well done Kobe.
ReplyDelete