What about Denis Rodman? How good was he?
Rodman was the tramp you need in a championship winning team in any sport. He was one of the biggest tramps to ever play the game.
He tried to play fairly but it wasnt in his make up
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You wont win an AI without at least one tinker, the same applies to most team sports.
Absolutely. That Pistons team of the late 80’s, early 90’s was unreal. A team of tramps. Rodman got most of the headlines but Bill Laimbeer was something else.
Big Bill timbered Larry Bird to all new levels.
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https://www.instagram.com/p/B7zS523ppk1/?igshid=1sks8ojhqbuqa
The conspiracy theorists are out early.
Fucks sake bbc
Thats a lol
How will Ewan be remembered I wonder?
Matt groening was quick off the mark
What’s the problem with the BBC report? I know nothing about this guy.
That’s not Kobe they’re showing, its some other black man. Very racist.
3 Likes
Jordan Michaels or someone like that I think it was
Its commentary was about Kobe but its visuals featured LeBron James but he’s still alive and well as far as I know.
Showing clips of another player lebron james
Ok lads. I’ve got it thanks.
Should be interesting to see which celebrities make his death about them .
What Kobe Bryant Meant
A tragedy in California takes the life of one of basketball’s best modern players and eight others, including his daughter, Gianna
Kobe Bryant celebrates after Game 7 of the 2010 NBA Finals. PHOTO: CHRISTIAN PETERSEN/GETTY IMAGES
By
Jason Gay
Jan. 26, 2020 6:38 pm ET
- TEXT
- 3
Kobe Bryant personified the modern sports alpha. On the court, he was the alpha, really—for better, and, sometimes, worse, in greatness and defeat, demanding to put the whole game on his shoulders when it mattered most, and even when it didn’t matter much at all. He was not playing basketball to make friends. He kept a restless edge, even among his teammates. Bryant played to win, period, and over his 20 seasons as a Los Angeles Laker, he won all the time, finishing with five championship rings, and a firm space among the very best to ever play the game.
His father, an itinerant former pro named Joe “Jellybean” Bryant, had bestowed upon his only son a perfect mononym—how many people named “Kobe” had you ever heard of before Bryant appeared on the scene, a lanky, multilingual high-school draftee from Philadelphia via Italy? And yet he still sought to give himself a nickname: Black Mamba, after the fastest lethal snake in the world. Bryant’s game was full of grace—end-to-end, he could be thrillingly fluid and floaty, and one-on-one, he was unguardable in his prime—but ultimately, he wanted to be viewed as a merciless competitor.
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There’s a whole basketball generation out there that patterned their game upon Bryant’s—if you think NBA fandom just segued artfully from Michael Jordan to LeBron James, you’re missing a big, essential group of people for whom Kobe was The One. Bryant straddled the game’s evolutions from in-the-paint aggression to perimeter shooting, because he really could do it all—score from anywhere, often double and triple teamed, and, let’s face it, with maybe a teammate or four wide open. He believed he was the best option, because he usually was. He finished with 33,643 career points—behind only Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Karl Malone and James, the last of whom passed his mark Saturday, hours before Bryant died in a helicopter crash that took the lives of eight others, including his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna.
Bryant’s Laker days will live forever. Love the Lakers or hate them, the NBA is more fun when Los Angeles’s principal basketball franchise is a treat to watch. Player turned boss Jerry West fleeced the Charlotte Hornets on draft day to land Bryant, and in 1996, the Lakers installed an 18-year-old from Lower Merion High School next to a relocated Shaquille O’Neal, sending them both off to compete with the long shadows of legends like West, Kareem and Magic Johnson.
In his first game, Kobe Bryant went scoreless. It did not prove to be a harbinger.
Kobe Bryant’s Historic Career
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Kobe Bryant’s Historic Career
No, the Lakers would become great again under Bryant, especially when Phil Jackson arrived with his Jordan era afterglow, and engineered a fragile detente between the carefree Shaq and the care-too-much Kobe. The Lakers won three straight titles from 2000 through 2002. It was Showtime all over again, and the courtside again crawled with mononyms—Jack! Leo! Dyan!—but none bigger than the two in purple and gold, out on the floor.
In 2003, Bryant was charged in Colorado with sexual assault—a case which became international news. The charges were dropped after the woman declined to testify, and Bryant later settled a civil suit connected with the case. The case had a familiar dynamic—a powerful celebrity, with voluminous resources and legal might, versus the unnamed. The episode would tarnish, but not undo Bryant’s career, and in his re-ascension, and the public’s return embrace, it was easy to see another familiar pattern, of a famous person who pushed forward, because that’s what famous person could do. And yet the Colorado case, and how it shook out, remained part of Bryant’s story.
Bryant would finish out the aughts with a championship back-to-back, in 2009 and 2010, this time without O’Neal, as if to prove he could really do it as The One. Maybe someone coveting a pretty ending would have called it there, but Bryant pushed on, through an epilogue that included a serious Achilles injury, a long layoff, some really terrible Laker teams, and an undeniable attrition of his skills. Kobe could still bring it, though, and he brought it mightily on his final NBA night, when he scored 60 points on 50 shots—50 shots!—in a Laker home win. It was all there, before the people who adored him the most, all his basketball brilliance and excesses.
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The Lakers are good again. LeBron is the latest mononym in town, and along with recent hire Anthony Davis, he has returned the club to the top of the Western Conference standings. It’s a different vibe—looser, less Mamba. When James arrived, there was wonderment how Bryant would handle the LeBron Lakers, but he did so with grace. He stayed around basketball, but not in the middle of it. He started an investment fund, its pitch being the same single-mindedness that made Bryant such a renowned competitor. He won an Academy Award, for an animated short film based on a poem he wrote called “Dear Basketball”:
As a six-year-old boy.
Deeply in love with you.
I never saw the end of the tunnel.
I only saw myself.
Running out of one.
What happened Sunday in California is a tragedy, foremost for the affected families, who face unimaginable pain. Bryant was fond of popping up at sports events with his family—at his final Olympics, London 2012, they’d turned up to watch Michael Phelps in the pool and Serena Williams on Centre Court. The Bryants were enormous supporters of the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team. He seemed to enjoy just being a fan, taking in someone else’s drama, simply as an observer. Very often, he’d be with one of his kids, including Gianna. This was a different, older Kobe Bryant—the ultimate sports alpha, no longer so edgy and restless, finding the satisfaction he’d chased so singularly on the court.
NO WORDS , seems to be the thing to tweet to get maximum effect. For someone to log on to twitter and write that when someone they didn’t even know dies . Its ridiculous
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