Kobe Bryant

He played twenty seasons and all of them for the same team, which no guard in the history of the league had done before.

His last game was on 13 April 2016. He was thirty-seven, his body was finished, the Lakers had won seventeen games all season, and the match meant nothing.

He scored 60 points.

Kobe Bean Bryant was born on 23 August 1978 in Philadelphia. His father Joe played in the NBA and then went to Italy, so Kobe spent most of his childhood there and grew up speaking Italian.

He came back for high school, and in 1996 went into the NBA draft straight out of it. Charlotte took him thirteenth and traded him to the Lakers.

He was seventeen when he was drafted and eighteen when he played his first game.

Shaquille O'Neal arrived the same summer. Between 2000 and 2002 the Lakers won three consecutive championships.

It was not a comfortable partnership and neither of them pretended otherwise. O'Neal was the most dominant player in the league and Bryant was not willing to be the second option in perpetuity. The team broke up in 2004.

What followed were four seasons in which he was the best scorer in basketball on teams that were not good enough.

Toronto came to Los Angeles and led by eighteen points in the third quarter.

Bryant scored 81. It is the second-highest total in NBA history and the highest by anyone not named Chamberlain. He took 46 shots and made 28, including seven three-pointers, and scored 55 in the second half alone.

The Lakers won 122–104. He had 62 in three quarters against Dallas earlier that same season, and sat out the fourth.

He won the scoring title in 2006 and again in 2007, and the MVP award in 2008.

Then he won two more championships, without O'Neal, and was Finals MVP in both — which was the thing he had spent five years being told he could not do.

The 2010 final went to a seventh game against Boston. He shot badly, 6 of 24, and took 15 rebounds instead. The Lakers won by four.

Five championships, in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2009 and 2010.

On 12 April 2013, chasing a playoff place at thirty-four, he tore his Achilles tendon against Golden State.

He stayed on the court and shot the two free throws he had been awarded. Both went in. Then he walked off.

He was never the same player afterwards. The last three seasons were injuries and losses, and in November 2015 he announced that the year would be his last.

The final game, against Utah at Staples Center.

He took 50 shots, which is more than anyone should take in a farewell, made 22 of them, and finished with 60 points. The Lakers came from fifteen down in the fourth quarter to win.

He was, as of 2026, the oldest player ever to score 60 in a game.

He died in a helicopter crash in Calabasas, California, along with his thirteen-year-old daughter Gianna and seven other people.

He was forty-one.

Nine All-Defensive First Teams is the part of the record that gets skipped. He guarded the opposition's best perimeter player for most of his career while carrying the entire offence.

Kevin Durant called him his generation's version of Michael Jordan, which is both a compliment and the thing Bryant spent his career being measured against.

The comparison was never entirely fair and he invited it anyway — the footwork, the fadeaway, the number 23 he did not wear but the mannerisms he absorbed. He was open about having studied Jordan deliberately and at length, which most players would not admit.

What was his own was the work. The stories about it are relentless and all of them check out: arriving at gyms at four in the morning, staying after everyone had left, keeping a schedule in the off-season that his own teammates found unreasonable. He gave it a name, the Mamba mentality, and it has outlived him as a phrase people use about things that have nothing to do with basketball.

The two numbers that frame it are 81 and 60. The first he scored at twenty-seven on a team that had no other way to win. The second he scored at thirty-seven, on a broken body, in a game that did not matter, in front of a building that had come to watch him leave.

Twenty years, one team, and he shot fifty times on his way out.