Kobe Bryant didn’t don a flashy red cape and he left the tights, I mean leg warmers, to the imagination when he took the court two Sundays ago. So how can anyone blame the Toronto Raptors for leaving the kryptonite back in the hotel?
Bryant rattled off 81 points against the Raptors, the second-highest point total for one player in a single game since Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in 1962.
Sure the 7-foot-tall Chamberlain did it before the advent of the three-point line, but such a height was not common among NBA players.
Bryant tallied 18 points from the free-throw line and made 28 of 46 shots from the field and 7 of 13 three-pointers.
He passed former Los Angeles Laker Elgin Baylor, who previously held the second-best mark of 71 points in a game, with four minutes and change left in the fourth quarter.
And before Bryant’s dismantling of the Raptors, only two other players other than Chamberlain or Baylor had scored more than 70 points in a game.
So what is most amazing about the greatest single-player performance in the three-point era?
It could be that we will never see anything like this ever happen again. Or maybe it’s that the Raptors didn’t even take a hard foul on Bryant because let’s face it, he is all the Lakers have. Or possibly it’s the fact that fellow players and coaches have been hitting too many bottles of heightorade. But those are all just sidebars.
Most remarkable of all is that Bryant single handedly completed the sweetest comeback on NFL Conference Championship weekend since John Elway orchestrated the infamous “Drive” against the Cleveland Browns in the 1987 AFC Title game.
The Lakers trailed by 14 points at halftime and that lead increased to 18 points near the beginning of the second half. That is when Bryant erupted for 55 of his 81 points in the second half, ultimately leading the Lakers to a 122-104 victory. Eighteen points is by no means insurmountable, but Bryant has had the Lakers on his back all season long.
He averaged 38 points per game in the six games leading up to the match against the Raptors.
I’d like to see another player score 81 points off jump shots and three-pointers. It’s not easy even uncontested, let alone having a hand in your face.
He has a team that wasn’t even picked for playoff contention in the top eight in the Western Conference.
Aside from Pittsburgh and Seattle, Bryant deservedly embraced the brunt of news coverage, completely stealing the show from the NFL. It was good news if you bleed blue and orange, because Bryant was the perfect clot.
Sure it didn’t help that neither the Broncos nor the Panthers showed up to play, but the bottom line is that Bryant ripped the glory from the NFL playoffs on a day religiously reserved for football.
The talk of the nation six days later was still Bryant, although most of it concerned other players, such as Vince Carter, jocking Bryant with jealousy. Carter slammed Bryant for taking 46 shots. He must not have received the memo that the Lakers were playing the other purple dinosaur, where sharing doesn’t mean caring.
The performance has even numbed the amount of Super Bowl chatter and speculation devoted to the year’s biggest NFL game. Hopefully the dejected faithful from Broncos nation were able to drown their sorrows in the embarrassment of the Raptors.
And for all Americans, it was a moment in professional sports where you should be able to recall what you were doing on Jan. 22 when Bryant dropped in his 81st point from the free-throw line with 43.4 seconds remaining in the game.
After all, the only player in the NBA currently deserving of a Superman tattoo on the bicep is Bryant.
