On Jan. 22, 2006 Kobe put up his iconic 81-point performance.
The passage of time has a unique way of spreading a wave of amnesia, making folks become forgetful or simply nudging them onto the next attention-grabbing event. That’s even more heightened in the current social media age where entire generations become prisoners of the moment, freed from the past.
There are historical exceptions, though. Certain phenomena continue to live and breathe and manage to preserve their own amazement.
Such as:
Kobe Bryant scored how many points?
Was it 81? And was it really 20 years ago today?
Because we’re currently three or four generations removed from the NBA’s official highest single-game scoring total, and also because that 1962 game was fossilized not with photos or video or even a tweet, but with the player holding a sheet of paper with a number scribbled on it, Kobe’s 81 is our Wilt Chamberlain’s 100.
It is the standard for today’s game with today’s rules and norms. It was produced by an iconic star who resonated deeply, and was captured live in its entirety on video, happening just as cutting-edge technology began cutting its teeth. Kobe scored 81. Right player, right time, right everything.
Unless you were the Toronto Raptors, who were on the opposite bench on that Jan. 22 day in 2006 at Staples Center in Los Angeles.
“Actually,” said Sam Mitchell the other day, “I’m over it. It was Kobe freaking Bryant, man. He had it going. We just took it. Whatcha gonna do?”
Mitchell was the Raptors’ coach then, and he who would’ve thrown the kitchen sink at Bryant, but it was tightly screwed to the wall upstairs in the food court, so he tried some other stuff. Actually, a lot of stuff.
“We did everything we could to try to slow this guy down and stop him,” Mitchell said. “I played every defense I could think of. I went all the way back to college defenses that were played against me. A box and 1. A triangle and 2. When’s the last time you heard someone play a triangle and 2? All of that.”
Mitchell added:
“But as I said, this is an all-time great. He would’ve had 81 against anyone that night.”
Sam Mitchell talks about Kobe’s 81-point game and the dominance of Kobe Bryant.
Here are the vital numbing numbers: Bryant took 46 shots, made 28, for 60%. He outscored Toronto 55-41 in the second half. He shot 18-20 from the free throw line and made seven 3-pointers. Despite a rather high degree of ball domination, he had only three turnovers in his 42 minutes, and those were erased by his three steals.
Bryant later remarked: “I really didn’t understand or was able to grasp what had happened.”
Those numbers he posted tell the partial story. As in these situations, there’s far more than a simple box score. The numbers don’t explain how Bryant went turbo in the second half. They don’t contextualize how Bryant needed to score because the game was competitive at one point. And they don’t reveal that until he erupted, the Raptors were in full control of the game right around the time when the famously late-arriving crowd was settling into the seats.
“People weren’t booing the Lakers, but people were getting upset because we were getting backdoor layups and everything,” said Mitchell. “If Kobe hadn’t had the mindset that he was going to take that game over, then we would’ve beaten the Lakers by 30.”
Well, the mindset changed suddenly, along with everything else as a result.
Neither of these teams were heavyweights then. Toronto was rebuilding with a young center named Chris Bosh. Bryant was running with Smush Parker and Chris Mihm as Lakers starters. So this tipoff wasn’t exactly hotly anticipated.
Toronto was up 63-49 at the half. The Raptors shot 65%. This was the best executed half of the season at that point for them. If anyone was on pace to have a career night, it was Mike James, a journeyman for the Raptors, who had 19 in the first half (he would score just seven more from there).
The subject of defending Bryant wasn’t hotly debated in the Toronto locker room at the break. He had just 26 points — again, nothing out of the unusual for him, especially against a rebuilding team — yet Toronto was winning comfortably.
Then the second half began.
From an episode of Real NBA, Kobe Bryant reflects on his 81-point game against the Raptors in 2006.
Mitchell had an early hint of the tornado to come.
“At the start of the third quarter, he was on the baseline and he drove and Morris Peterson did a great job of cutting him off,” Mitchell said. “And Kobe stopped and pump-faked three times, then spun totally opposite and took a fadeaway jump shot, after he pump-faked those three times. And hit nothing but the bottom of the net.”
Oh, it was on.
Those charged with defending Bryant were Jalen Rose, primarily, with Peterson and Joey Graham as secondary defenders. About Rose: He was well past his prime of a decent career. It was his 12th season, and his teammates playfully poked fun at his expanding gut, asking him when he was due.
But actually, it could’ve been a hybrid of Dennis Rodman, Draymond Green and Hakeem Olajuwon on Bryant. Wouldn’t have mattered.
“Go back and look at what types of shots he made,” Mitchell said. “It’ll blow your mind. He was pump-faking three, four times and then spinning opposite of the defense while shooting. I’m trying to figure out how he even had the balance to do that.”
The Raptors initially tried to guard Kobe straight-up with a lone defender and, like everything else that night, it didn’t work. Years later, in hindsight, Rose said Toronto should’ve tossed more bodies at Kobe. Mitchell didn’t totally agree.
“I remember telling José Calderón to try and face guard him,” said Mitchell. “Try and deny him the ball. Don’t let him catch it. Because if he catches it, we’re in trouble. Even if we ran double teams at him he got Lamar Odom out there. People said we should’ve triple-teamed him. Man, this ain’t high school. This is the NBA. You can’t leave 6-11 players open under the basket to guard a guy 18 feet from the basket.”
Bryant scored against eight different Toronto defenders. He torched Rose for 18 points, Peterson for 17. Calderón later said, “It’s not like he was wide open. He was contested.”
Again, the Raptors’ defense, while not nearly perfect, which could’ve used a stopper or at least a few more double teams, according to Rose, seemed credible that night. Meanwhile, Bryant was incredible.
We go into the vault to hear how NBA players reacted to Kobe’s 81-point game.
“For people to say you should’ve done this or that, go watch the game,” said Mitchell. “It doesn’t bother me because I know what we tried to do, the work we put in. Our guys were trying.”
Gradually, as the game progressed, word spread around the league and the country. Folks became curious when Kobe had 27 points (to Toronto’s 22) in the third quarter. Then, a game that began auspiciously suddenly magnetized anyone with an imagination, no matter where they were at the time.
Roughly three months earlier, Bryant had 62 against the Mavericks when Lakers coach Phil Jackson pulled him for good after three quarters. In this game with Toronto, the Lakers trailed at one point by 18.
“The difference was in this game,” Mitchell said, “Kobe needed to do that to win. At halftime, he decided to take the freaking game over.”
Kobe had it working. Baseline jumpers, step-backs, dunks, and-1s, free throws. And the buzz from the crowd, which was on its feet throughout the fourth quarter, only encouraged more of the same. The Raptors were getting frustrated, along with getting embarrassed, but did nothing that crossed the line.
“People said you should’ve sent someone in to give him a hard foul,” said Mitchell. “OK, let me get this straight. I put somebody in the game, they get a little enthusiastic and foul Kobe hard and Kobe gets hurt. I was a former pro player, and I was a coach. So my strategy against a guy having a great game was to tell somebody to hurt him? How is that competition? How is that basketball?
“I know how to lose with dignity. When a guy has an unbelievable game, and he does it the right way, with no talking trash, pointing fingers, flexing, none of that, show that man respect. You don’t try to hurt him.”
You can only try to stop him, but Bryant was having none of that, not on this night. He had to go nuclear because his teammates were chilly. The bench combined to shoot 2-for-11. Odom was 1-for-7, and Kwame Brown was 1-for-5. Jackson later said, “We just had to keep going with the hot hand.”
Kobe’s final points came on a pair of free throws with 42 seconds left. The Lakers later had shirts made with the number 81 to salute the accomplishment. A game that once appeared to become a layup for Toronto flipped into a 122-104 Lakers win. Mitchell said the Raptors, by virtue of their early dominance, actually and indirectly hurt their cause.
“We had never won in L.A. before,” he said. “It was big for us. If it would have been a five- or six-point game, Kobe probably would’ve had his regular 35 points and called it a day. But because we were kicking his ass, he got pissed off.”
Years later, when Kobe ran into Mitchell, the two had a good conversation, and Kobe helped the coach feel a little less guilty. Here was Mitchell’s memory of that chat:
“He said that night, wasn’t nobody going to stop him. He said the basket looked like the ocean. No matter what he was throwing up, it was going in. He said, ‘If I would’ve scored 81 and we lost, people would say I’m selfish. The difference between me and other players is my focus was to try and win games.’ That was the kind of player he was and his thought process. And he never bragged about scoring 81 in the game.”
This, after all, was Kobe Bryant. As Mitchell put it, “There’s nothing more you can say.”
* * *
Shaun Powell has covered the NBA since 1985. You can email him here, find his archive here and follow him on Twitter.
