Built to Lose - Deleted Scenes - VI
On its five-year anniversary, an inside account of Kobe Bryant's final game, while the Golden State Warriors won their 73rd of that 2015-16 season.
Welcome, folks. My name is Jake Fischer. I’m a former Sports Illustrated NBA reporter and current Bleacher Report contributor. If you’re here, you probably know my first book, ‘Built to Lose: How the NBA’s Tanking Era Changed the League Forever’, will be out May 4. It covers Hinkie’s Sixers, the post-Big Three Celtics, old Kobe’s Lakers, some crazy Kings drama, plus so much more. And if you subscribe to this newsletter, you’ll receive a 30% off discount code for pre-ordering a copy.
Like I mentioned in the first, second, third, fourth and fifth, installments, there’s a good bit of new information I learned reporting this book that didn’t fit between its two covers. Below is the sixth post of this bi-weekly newsletter you’re presently reading, where I’m sharing some of the anecdotes that didn’t make the final cut.
Today’s newsletter only features one truly epic scene. If you’re an NBA fan, you were glued to a television on April 13, 2016, either watching the last game of Kobe Bryant’s 20-year career or the Golden State Warriors’ pursuit of a record 73rd win—or both. It’s a storied evening I really wanted to highlight in Built to Lose, but that loss is this newsletter’s gain…
See, the Lakers are the outlier of the NBA’s modern tanking era. After Orlando sent Dwight Howard to Los Angeles in 2012 and Phoenix did the same with Steve Nash—and even after Boston moved on from Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce in 2013—the Lakers remained steadfast in trying to build a contender around the aging Bryant, his torn Achilles and subsequent knee and shoulder injuries be damned. Rebuilding made all sorts of sense for Los Angeles, but the Lakers never openly rebuild, despite the newfound wisdom that was sweeping across rival front offices. “I think it was just impossible,” says Dan D’Antoni, Mike’s brother, and a former Lakers assistant coach. “It had to be totally cleared out, one way or another.”
Mitch Kupchak’s front office, of course, railed the opposite direction, splurging first on Howard and Nash, then maintaining a belief they could land both LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony in 2014 free agency, and later hoping for LaMarcus Aldridge in 2015. All the while, Bryant’s body grew more withered and broken, and the Lakers became an unforeseen fixture of lottery night while Sam Hinkie’s 76ers and Danny Ainge’s Celtics played those ping pong balls as aggressive as any.
That conflict was more than evident throughout Bryant’s final season in 2015-16, the last year chronicled in Built to Lose. The Lakers now rostered potential future cornerstones in D’Angelo Russell, Julius Randle and Jordan Clarkson, but it was also Bryant’s retirement tour, and there was a segment of Lakers brass who believed celebrating Bryant to such a degree could perhaps entice some far-off superstar, like LeBron perhaps, to want the same Hollywood treatment in the latter stage of his own career. “There was definitely that tug-and-pull,” says Ryan Kelly, the former Lakers forward. “The organization wanted to show that respect and admiration of Kobe, but then also knew that the future was coming fast.”
Los Angeles sure enough stumbled to 17-65 on the season, bottom in the Western Conference and second-worst in the league behind only those porous Sixers. But on April 13, that all went out the window. For the final stop of Bryant’s retirement tour, the Lakers hosted the Jazz in a sold-out Staples Center. Two giant stickers of the number 24, written in bold, white ink and framed in a purple line, were pasted onto opposite corners of the court. Stars from Kanye to David Beckham, Jay-Z and Snoop, Jack and Shaq lined courtside seats and dotted the stands. Nobody in Los Angeles, quite frankly, gave any ounce of shit about the Warriors’ pursuit of history 300 miles north.
As the arena filled and pregame warmups ensued, Kupchak lingered nervously in the tunnel that separated the Lakers’ locker room from the floor. When Clay Moser, a member of his front office, approached Kupchak, the general manager asked for a prediction for that night’s affair.
“I don’t know really, but I know the team, I was in the locker room, and the team told Kobe they were gonna make sure that he got 30,” Moser said. “They were just gonna spoon feed him. It didn’t matter if we won or lost.”
“We knew we had to just get him the ball,” Russell can confirm.
“Everybody was on board, you know?” adds Jim Eyen, a Lakers assistant coach.
Maybe it was that inorganic strategy, the gravity of the moment, or Bryant’s creakier joints having yet to loosen, but he missed his first four attempts. Nobody on the court faired much better. Almost seven full minutes into the ball game, Utah led Los Angeles by a whopping total of 6-4.
“He wasn’t really making no shots at the start of the game,” recalls Alec Burks, a Jazz guard. “I don’t know what happened, but I guess he realized it was his last game or something and he just started taking over and made everything he shot. I mean, that’s how he’s supposed to go out. He’s Kobe.”
With 5:25 left in the first quarter, Bryant swooped in to block Utah’s Trevor Booker. He took the ball into the front court, shook Gordon Hayward with a crossover, head-faked all comers, and lofted a high-arcing rainbow through the net. The Lakers' next trip down the floor, Bryant danced around a high-ball screen and drilled a mid-range pull-up.
“Then he got hot,” says Lakers center Robert Sacre. “It was like, ‘Uh oh. The Mamba is on. The Mamba!’”
Bryant isolated Rodney Hood on the wing, weaved into the paint, and flipped an acrobatic, and-one reverse layup. With 3:21 to play in the frame, Bryant caught a pass from Russell in the right corner, with Hood draped all over him once again. He stepped back this time, leaving only a toe on the three-point line, and cashed a jumper right in front of the Lakers’ bench. The arena instantly morphed into a madhouse.
“For him to start off shooting as poorly as he did, and then to flip it over and turn it into an unbelievable game, is something I will always remember,” Kelly says. “It doesn’t matter what you’ve shot, it matters what you’ll shoot the rest of the way. It might be a little easier when you know you’re going to get 40 more shots… but that was truly miraculous.”
After Bryant’s long-two, the Jazz burst down the court and Joe Ingles drilled a three-pointer. But Bryant rushed back the opposite direction, leaked out to the right wing and dropped in a triple of his own. He’d made five-straight buckets, rallying off 12-straight points to give the Lakers their first lead of the evening. Players on the Lakers’ bench were bouncing as if they were front row at a concert.
“I don’t have no other way to explain it,” Russell says. “It felt like a movie, just how many times that he made shots that you didn’t think he would make. Him going on a run like he was 22 years old again. The shots that he was shooting, just seeing how magical the arena was, the atmosphere in there was just glowing.”
Bryant made a handful of free throws before the quarter came to a close. Midway through the second, he drove around Hayward yet again for a baseline layup. He head-faked Jazz rookie Trey Lyles on the perimeter next, and stepped into another triple.
“And then, Mitch goes, ‘You think he can get 30?’” says Clay Moser, the Lakers staffer. “And I said, ‘I don’t think he can get 30. It’s a lot…’”
Meanwhile, a five-hour drive up I-5, Golden State had built a 14-point lead over Memphis in their 12 minutes of action. The Warriors brought a 20-point edge into their halftime locker room. They were only minutes from becoming the greatest team in regular season history, yet Golden State personnel learned then that Bryant had posted 22 in his opening half, and as the Warriors’ third quarter unfolded, the home bench in Oracle Arena was buzzing for updates on Bryant’s performance as much as their own affair. “You know everybody’s got a phone,” Draymond Green laughs. “We just asked a couple people…”
And Bryant’s buckets kept coming. With 10:30 to play in the third quarter, he crossed Hood again, slipping into lane for easy left-handed lay-in. He scored another in the paint on Hayward. On the next trip, Bryant missed a three from the top arc, only for Roy Hibbert to tip the rebound back out, allowing Bryant to corral the miss and slither all the way to the rim.
When the Jazz called timeout, a raucous chant of “KO-BE! KO-BE!” rained down from the rafters and echoed off the Lakers’ championship banners.
“I think everybody was pretty scared to even shoot it,” Ryan Kelly says. “You were afraid if you shot you might get booed, even if you made it. Everybody in the building wanted Kobe to score.”
With 5:40 to play in the third, he drove around Hayward yet again, hanging and scoring as he was always wont to do. He looked every part of vintage Bryant, those venomous fangs puncturing a foe one strike at a time. Yet there was no characteristic bark with Bryant’s bite this night. He spit little trash talk, seemingly so focused on the task at hand.
At one moment in the quarter, Utah’s point guard and Brazilian ball handler Raul Neto overheard Bryant communicating in Spanish with Lakers reserve, and Neto’s fellow countrymen, Marcelo Huertas. “So I was like, just playing with him saying, ‘Hey, I understand Spanish! Watch out!’” Neto recalls. “Kobe just looked surprised and laughed.”
Then with 5:07 remaining in the third, Neto found himself switched onto Bryant. They danced on the right side. Bryant spun baseline, with his defender so close he could still smell Neto’s breath. “I literally touched his hand on the contest and he still made it,” Neto says. “That’s a play I don’t forget.”
Bryant reached 32 points with the bucket. Then he jabbed against Ingles and drilled another three in the right corner. A few minutes later, he scurried past Ingles for another lay-up.
For all the hoopla, though, Utah still carried a 77-66 lead into the game’s final frame. The Jazz then extended their lead to 82-68, before Bryant went on to score… and score again… and again…
“We were down big and he comes back. It was a pretty terrific way to end your career,” says Eyen, the Lakers’ assistant coach. “He took it over, there’s no doubt.”
With 9:36 remaining, Los Angeles secured a steal and rumbled into a fastbreak. Huertas then kicked the ball back to Bryant for a trailing three. His shot sizzled through the net, giving Bryant 40 points for the 122nd time in his career, yet only the first since November 2014.
He drilled another three 30 seconds later. A few minutes passed, then Bryant snaked around a high-screen from Julius Randle, pulled up at the foul line, and drained an impossible jumper with three Utah defenders all joining him in the proverbial phone booth, bringing the Lakers to within 87-84 of the Jazz.
“He went from 30 to 40 in just one of those blinks of the eye,” says Moser, the Lakers staffer. “It might have even been 30 to 45, like, ‘Good lord, is he gonna? Holy cow, that’s unbelievable. My god. Can he get 40? He’s gonna get 40. Can he get 50? No there’s no way he can get 50, 50 is unreasonable...’”
Back in Oakland, the Warriors indeed capped off their monumental evening with a victory. They stayed out on the court, Golden State’s players and coaches celebrating surpassing the 1995-96 Bulls when Michael Jordan led Chicago to a 72-10 campaign. At last, the festivities started trickling back into the Warriors’ locker room. “We were just hearing about [Kobe], hearing about it as the game went on,” Green says.
“Everybody’s whispering, ‘Kobe’s got 40,’” says Warriors head coach Steve Kerr. His staff all crowded around the television in their changing area, within earshot of Golden State’s players hooting and hollering as Bryant’s scoring total kept mounting.
With 3:07 left in Los Angeles, Bryant drove around Hayward once more. About a minute later, Bryant scored his 49th and 50th points on another layup, the first NBA player to ever cross that threshold in his final game.
“We tried different coverages. We tried switching. We tried trapping him,” Neto says. “Like everyone knows, it doesn’t matter when he’s hot. He can score any type of way and that’s what he did. He got fouled, he scored jump shots. Just in general, he was amazing in that game.”
The next possession, Bryant split Utah’s double-team for another patented pull-up at the elbow, trimming the Jazz’s lead to 4. After another stop, and another high-screen from Randle, Bryant hoisted a moon ball over Trey Lyles on the left wing, and it splashed through the net.
The 39-year-old was huffing and puffing, jaw hung askew, clamoring for air.
“Every time he was coming back to the bench he was, like, collapsing into the bench,” Kelly says. “You’re like, ‘How could this guy keep going?’ And he managed to get back up every time.”
After another defensive stop, Bryant received yet another screen from Randle. This time, at the top of the key, Randle and Hayward got tangled like two shirts on a clothesline, clearing enough space for Bryant to probe for another long jumper, 58 points, and the Lakers’ fresh lead, 97-96.
Utah called for timeout.
“There was a determined look on his face. That just took over,” says Eyen, the Lakers assistant. “Everybody’s saying, ‘Where do you want the ball?’
“Well this is unique,” Bryant cooed in the huddle. “Now you want me to shoot? Everybody for years was telling me I shoot too much! Now I’m not shooting enough?”
Bryant would get fouled on the Lakers’ next possession. He connected on both attempts to reach that immortal echelon of 60 points, having scored 23 in the game’s final quarter—many of which Golden State brass were able to watch. Once Hayward missed a last-ditch-effort layup, Bryant threw the ball ahead to Clarkson for a runout slam. The Jazz called a final timeout, and Staples Center exploded into its final crescendo of the evening. “People were besides themselves,” Moser says. “People were crying.”
Those final four seconds melted off the clock, and the arena roared louder and louder. The Lakers bench cleared entirely, with Bryant bear-hugging Randle, Clarkson and Russell at center court, almost like he was clutching the future of the franchise.
“I think he was so happy to walk away from the game how he did,” Russell says. “He was almost 100 percent sure he worked as hard as he could, dissected every piece of film, he killed every opponent he could, he didn’t take the game for granted. For your mind to work like that, I think that’s a beautiful thing.”
There was an assembly line of high-fives and hugs, former players and Lakers figures all flooding the court for their moment with the legend. But there were still post-game interviews to conduct and a final speech to profess to the Los Angeles faithful at the center of the floor.
“As I walked up to him, he sort of had this dazed look on his face,” says John Black, the Lakers’ former PR chief. “And he just said to me, ‘What the fuck just happened?’”
“I have no idea,” Black said, “but it was really fun to watch.”
‘Built to Lose: How the NBA’s Tanking Era Changed the League Forever,” arrives on May 4.
You can subscribe to this newsletter and receive a 30% off discount code.