Kobe Bryant returns to the Air Canada Centre for the final time as an active player Monday (excluding the All-Star Game in February, of course). The 20-year-veteran announced recently that he’ll retire at the conclusion of this season, making Monday’s game against the Raptors his last.
It’s also his first in nearly three calendar years, as injuries have conspired to keep Bryant on the shelf far more often than not the last three seasons. They’ve also managed to suck a lot of what made Bryant Bryant out of his legs and body, with the 17-time All-Star struggling to perform up to his own lofty standards…or anyone else’s far lesser standards. Still, on a historic night that’s sure to mean a ton to basketball fans in the city, we can take a step back and focus on the positives, on the history, and on the legacy.
While Bryant’s legacy has a lot to do with being polarizing, with championships, with an MVP, with being the last next Michael Jordan, his best single-game performance is a big part of it, too. That performance came against the Raptors on Jan. 22, 2006, when Bryant dropped 81 points, the second-highest point total ever scored in an NBA game.
Black Mamba shot 28-of-46 from the field in the 122-104 victory, hitting 7-of-13 from long range, 18-of-20 at the line, and adding six rebounds, two assists, three steals, and one block. The Raptors countered with 26 points from The “Amityville Scorer” Mike James which was, uhhh, not enough. For a long time the game was close, the Raptors leading by 14 at the half before Bryant went insane in the third quarter to help take a three-point lead. That included 15 points in a four-minute stretch early in the grame.
From there the game became about seeing how many Bryant would put up, the collection of Morris Peterson, Jalen Rose, and Joey Graham unable to offer anything to slow Bryant down. That included taking every Lakers’ shot in the game’s final 6:31, save for two Sasha “The Machine” Vujacic attempts that probably got him scolded afterward. Bryant closed with 22 points in that final 6:31, subbing out with four seconds left in the game.
You can relive the entire performance here:
“Not even in my dreams,” Bryant said after the game. “That was something that just happened. It’s tough to explain. It’s just one of those things. It really hasn’t, like, set in for me. It’s about the `W,’ that’s why I turned it on. It turned into something special. To sit here and say I grasp what happened, that would be lying.”
“We were just watching him shoot,” Chris Bosh said at the time. “He takes the type of shots where you don’t think they’re going in, but suddenly he’s rolling, so he’s kind of hard to stop. We tried three or four guys on him, but it seemed like nobody guarded him tonight.”
It was bad enough that Tas Melas of The Starters (then The Basketball Jones) sought an apology from Bryant at the 2010 All-Star Game. (Fun fact: TBJ debuted the same week as Bryant’s 81-point game.)
