Kobe Bryant’s last three NBA seasons were difficult to watch. After tearing his Achilles late in the 2012-13 campaign, he didn’t even remotely resemble the player he had been for nearly a decade and a half, and he had trouble staying healthy.
In those last three years, the late Los Angeles Lakers great averaged 18.9 points a game on 36.6% shooting from the field and 28.5% from 3-point range.
But he left everyone with one last indelible memory of his greatness by pouring in 60 points and leading the Lakers to victory after trailing by 10 with 3:20 left in his last game. While he was relatively efficient, he took a whopping 50 shots, as everyone wanted him to shoot the basketball as often as possible.
D’Angelo Russell, who was then a rookie and in his first stint with the team, recalled how everyone always wanted the ball to go to Bryant in that game while on the “Run Your Race” podcast.
“Bro, when you got the ball and they boo you, you know what that means. Get that ball to that man. He was just trying to score. I remember Julius [Randle] was like, ‘Bro, I’m just trying to get on the board. I’m just trying to score. I ain’t trying to have zero.’ So everybody was just trying to get two, like just get two. He’s gonna get all the other ones.
“So that’s what it was. It was really us running around trying to get him the ball because they were trapping him. He was shooting tough twos like one-footed inside the 3-point line twos, like pull-ups. You just see his face he looked young. He just looked like he had it. I don’t know what was getting him through that [expletive]. He didn’t come out of the game. He was prepared, though. You could see it, mentally, he was prepared. Everybody in the world was at the game. Denzel [Washington], Shaq (Shaquille O’Neal), like everybody.”
In that game, only one other Lakers — guard Jordan Clarkson — managed to get into double figures, and no one on the team other than Bryant attempted more than 10 shots. Russell went 4-of-10 and scored nine points with five assists in 36 minutes.
In a purely sentimental sense, it may have been Bryant’s finest moment or at least fans’ favorite memory of his storied career.