Kobe Bryant now looking the weary wolf as time catches up
In England, Jose Mourinho can’t buy a win.
In the States, Kobe Bryant can’t sink a shot.
And for those of us living between them, watching on, there is something compelling, quite comical and tragic about how much the mighty are falling and unravelling.
At the weekend just past, Mourinho lost his seventh league game of the season. Bryant, meanwhile, played probably — and hopefully, for his sake — his last game in Madison Square Garden. It’s a venue he’s averaged 29.9 points a game in, a rate of scoring that fittingly only Michael Jordan has bettered and LeBron James equals, but the Bryant and the LA Lakers that visited there last Sunday was a mere shadow of their former glory.
The New York Knicks did everything they could to let the Lakers win the game. Two minutes into the second half, they trailed by eight. When Bryant checked back into the game with eight minutes to go, his side were still up 86-83. But then he and the Lakers kept missing everything. The Knicks missed a lot as well — following it on my phone, the Knicks’ next three consecutive offensive play-by-plays read ‘Kristaps Porzingis misses 24-foot three-point jumper’, ‘Carmelo Anthony misses 25-foot three-point jumper’, ‘Jose Calderon misses 24-foot three-point jumper’ — but eventually then Carmelo got a 15- footer to drop.
The Lakers couldn’t — from any range. On our phone, the play-by-play read ‘Kobe Bryant misses 5-foot jumper’. We’d no idea just how poor an effort it was though, not until after the game when its vine went viral. It was a finger roll more than a jump shot, which didn’t even touch the rim. He’d airballed a finger roll, bringing his shooting to the night to 6 for 15.
Yet he kept bombing away, or to be more precise, bricking away. He’d miss a 16-footer. Then when the Knicks eventually went ahead 92-90 with 1:42 to go, Kobe responded with a 22-footer that clanked off the rim. With 39 seconds to go and the Knicks lead out to eight, he fired up a shot from four feet outside the three-point line, while guarded by two men.
It was reminiscent of another clip that has gone viral the past week, mocking the 37 year-old’s demise.
Showing a series of missed shots from last week’s game against the Denver Nuggets, The Cauldron website accompanied their video with a mock commentary mashup of the computer game NBA Jam. ‘Bryant — not a chance!’ ‘From downtown! — What was that?!’ ‘Bryant! — He should have retired!’ Then when he finally did make a shot, the devastating line was ‘Oh, my, what a great contract!’
Bryant is on €25m this season from the Lakers, more than any other player in the entire league, which is why your sympathy for him should be limited. Plus, of course, there’s the reality his inevitable decline through age and cumulative injuries is all the more pronounced because the man is too proud to become more of a role player and a facilitator.
The terrific NBA writer Bill Simmons once wrote the film that best typified the dilemma at the heart of basketball wasn’t some revered film like Hoosiers but rather Teen Wolf.
That wasn’t just some Michael J Fox vehicle or high school comedy but rather a thinking man’s basketball movie. An average player turns into a werewolf and with it transforms into a do-it-all and do-it-alone jock, leaving opponents hapless and his teammates mere props. So they start to sulk.
Come the playoffs, Fox plays as himself, not the Wolf. Instead of going for 81 points and just three assists, he goes — by Simmons’ pedantic research — for 14 points and six assists as his team — team being the operative word — win the title.
Simmons’ thesis was that Bryant’s whole career has been spent vacillating between a Fox and a Wolf, and too often not knowing where the balance was.
For sure, Bryant could be a Fox. When Team USA first met up before the 2007 FIBA Americas championships Bryant didn’t take a single shot in their first practice. Not one. He didn’t say a word about it either but Mike ‘Coach K’ Krzyzewski got the statement loud and clear. “He was willing to adopt a different role than he did with the Lakers,” Krzyzewski would later write in The Gold Standard.
Bryant would back it all up. He’d share the ball. And yet, as Simmons would observe, rarely has the world’s best active-player argument ever resolved itself so organically as the last quarter of the 2008 Olympic gold medal game against Spain. In the clutch, with the USA in danger of losing, Bryant made the clutch plays. And yet there was nothing forced about it. The other big names, LeBron, Carmelo, Wade, simply deferred to Kobe, The Fox.
There was little as entertaining in all of basketball as watching Bryant go all Wolf. Like the night he scorched the Toronto Raptors for 81 points back in January 2006. Even last year when the Lakers lost nine of their opening 10 games just as they’ve lost all but one of their opening six games this season, Bryant was still must-see viewing. Sure he must have been horrible to play with, and a nightmare to coach for any self-respecting and conscientious practitioner of that art (which Byron Scott evidently isn’t), but he was terrific to watch. He may have been shooting less than 40% from the field, but he was still scoring 40 some nights.
Now? There’s no upside at all. The Lakers still suck, and no one more than Kobe. He’s still trying to be the Wolf when he no longer can.
It is what has made him such an obsessive player and one of the all-time greats but also that which has stopped him being even greater. Like Bryant, Tim Duncan has won five championships. But unlike Bryant, he is still challenging for a sixth, at 39. He’s always been more of a Fox and now more than ever.
The NBA regular season is a marathon 82 games. Bryant still has 76 games to go in what he must surely realise is his last. And while this season and the last few will blur in time and be a mere footnote in his career, watching Father Time night in and night out defeat one of sport’s most defiant and seemingly untouchable talents will make grim and compelling voyeurism.
