“Knew the janitor, he opened up the gym for me, I was there until sun came up”: When Kobe Bryant air-balled 4 shots against the Jazz in a playoffs elimination game and went straight to practice

A failure in the first season of his 20-years long NBA career resulted in Kobe Bryant developing The Mamba Mentality

Kobe Bryant was one of the greatest players ever to play the game of basketball. He’d be top-5 in most people’s list of all-time greats without any influence from his death at a young age and in an accident.

His unique and relentless work ethic, one in a billion mentalities, and the talent that he worked tirelessly to become THE GUY on the court whenever he played and even when he played in the league full of all-time greats makes him a candidate for GOAT.

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But there is always a ‘but’ however great a personality you’re talking about. In this case, it was Kobe’s lack of reliability and dependency on his teammates. That resulted in him doing almost all the work to get a win, regardless of how big a star he was playing with after Shaquille O’Neal.

Get this, Bryant managed to score 39,283 career points while missing e 14,481 shots. To put that in perspective one of the greatest point guards of all time and his teammate at the Los Angeles Lakers, Steve Nash, who played in the NBA for 18 seasons had a career shot attempts of 12,892.

When Kobe Bryant turned into Black Mamba

A teenage Kobe Bryant was no different from the legend who he started to become in the years to come. A rookie with the Los Angeles Lakers, once threw up four airballs against the Utah Jazz in crunch time of the biggest game of his young career.

It was the Game 5 of the Western Conference Semi-finals of 1997, and the future 5x champion might have had the night that made him who he became a few years later. The Mamba Mentality might have ignited that very night when he failed to deliver at one of the biggest stages of his career.

What he had to say afterward gives the hint of why he named himself Black Mamba.

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