Kobe Bryant was not just some normal NBA player. No indeed: He was the second-best shooting guard in the history of the Los Angeles Lakers franchise, and something like the 11th-best Laker overall, and possibly one of the dozen or so best players who played the bulk of their careers between 1996 and 2016; at his peak, he was almost as good as Tracy McGrady, his contemporary. In some seasons he was debatably the third- or fourth-best player in the NBA, if you feel like being generous. This is not a distinction you can bestow on just any old guy, although it is one you could argue for bestowing on something like eight different players in any given NBA season. Also he died in a helicopter crash at the age of 41. It is for these reasons that Bryant's professional achievements must never be surpassed by anyone.
"[Kobe's] death puts greater weight on every one of his most cherished feats and creates a sense that they should be handled with a certain kind of care," as the Athletic's Sam Amick put it on Wednesday. In his blog, Amick argues that Bam Adebayo of the Miami Heat should have stopped scoring points when he scored his 81st point in Tuesday night's win over the putrid and disgraceful Washington Wizards—equalling Kobe's career-high and tying for the second highest single-game scoring total in NBA history—instead of canning two more free-throws to finish with 83 on the night.
One must not idly displace Kobe Bryant from somewhere near the top of a historical chart! When Kobe dished his career-high 17th assist of the night on Jan. 15, 2015, in a seven-point loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers, he was not just entering into a hundreds-way tie for something like 5,000th place in the NBA record book for most assists in a single game; he was gracing the sport with his legacy. Who can forget the moment when he threw whatever type of pass it was, to whichever guy, and so etched his name very tinily somewhere extremely far down on the pedestal of history? No one, that is who. And not only because no one remembered it in the first place, but because when Kobe does it, it means something.
You just wish Trae Young had had that in mind any of the 14 different times he has recorded a 17th assist in a game so far in his career, and had the choice between stopping there or continuing to get more assists—maybe the eight times that he recorded at least one more assist might have gone differently had he considered all that. Think of what it would mean to "some of the people from Bryant’s past" whom Amick spoke to, to know that in a theoretical gigantic group photo of the top several thousand single-game assist-getters in NBA history, Kobe Bryant could remain one of the tiny pixels on there, instead of getting surpassed eight times by Trae Young. And 19 times by Chris Paul. All of that is lost, now!
Kobe himself—who, as the worst player in the NBA, logged 42 minutes and shot 22-for-50 in the final game of his career, shamelessly gunning for the most atrocious and appalling 60 points ever scored—would certainly never stoop to the kind of "stat chasing" Amick decries as having tainted Adebayo's 83-point performance. When, in the sacrosanct 81-point performance, Bryant shot nine free-throws in the final 2:36 of a game the Lakers led by more than a dozen points, it wasn't so he could surpass the 78 points Wilt Chamberlain scored on Dec. 8, 1961 and claim second place on the all-time leaderboard for single-game scoring performances. It was for some other reason! The fulsome articulation of which I'm sure Sam Amick's editor deleted from his blog!
The man whose entire professional life, right down to his speech patterns in interviews and how he chewed gum on the court, was a meticulously constructed monument to his obsession with mimicking and surpassing Michael Jordan did all that for the love of the game, man, not for optics. The guy who punted the very 2005–06 season in which he recorded the 81-point game and alienated every one of his teammates in open pursuit of his first scoring title wasn't in it for the numbers. The guy who produced an animated short film about his own greatness and gave himself his own most famous nickname after Jordan declined it wasn't out there for self-promotion. Also I slipped and hit my head on the corner of the bathroom sink very hard a little while ago.
After I die, no one is allowed to be better looking than I was. It's disrespectful.
