LOS ANGELES.- For one of the 10 greatest NBA players of all-time, at 36 years old, Kobe Bryant still understands exceedingly little about the game of basketball.

That or he’s wilfully ignorant to its lessons. All the truly transcendent superstar players throughout history, the Russells, Jordans, Magics and Birds of the world, approached basketball with the following mindset: what can I do to help my team win?

Kobe, like Wilt Chamberlain before him, has always approached the game with the opposite mindset: what can my team do to help me win?

He’s an individual athlete eternally burdened by the inconvenient fact that he plays a team sport.

That’s why when I was walking out of Staples Center Sunday evening in Downtown L.A. after yet another embarrassing, meaningless Lakers loss in an utterly meaningless season, I had one overarching thought: you deserve this Kobe, you really, really do.

In my NBA watching career there are two sequences which I always remember above all others. The first is LeBron’s ‘God Mode’ performance in the fourth quarter of Game 6 against San Antonio.

The second was something Kobe Bryant did in the 2010 Finals.

The series was tied at 2-2 with the Celtics and Game 5 in Boston was slipping away from L.A.

Then in the third quarter Kobe Bryant said ‘no’.

Bryant put on an all-time show, hitting 7 consecutive unspeakable, contested shots to keep the Lakers alive with a 17 point solo burst in four minutes.

Although the Lakers eventually lost the game, Kobe’s performance remained imprinted in my mind.

Until that point, I had never seen an athlete inflict their will on a game to the extent that Bryant did in that third quarter.

The player that Bryant was that day, the explosive scorer and dynamic athletic force, doesn’t exist anymore. That much was clear on Sunday evening.

Scoring used to be effortless for #24 but now he has to work incredibly hard to get his points.

Bryant used to be the most versatile offensive threat in the league – someone who could get to the rim, the line and pull up and get off a decent shot from anywhere on the court.

That versatility is gone.

On virtually every possession Sunday night Bryant did the exact same thing.

He works hard to establish position on the perimeter, receives the ball then backs his man down in the mid-post before turning around for a fade-away jump shot. Every. Single. Time.

Bryant doesn’t have the explosion to finish at the rim anymore and he doesn’t have the lift to reliably shoot threes. – Agencies.

 

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