Next year will be the 30th anniversary of the 1996 NBA Draft, and if there’s one thing we need to celebrate, it’s somebody to explain how Kobe Bryant fell to the 13th pick. Any story of Kobe’s idol Michael Jordan includes the bit about how he was infamously drafted third behind Hakeem Olajuwon and Sam Bowie, yet despite going 10 picks later and still achieving greatness, there’s never been an adequate explanation of how Kobe fell to 13th.
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This is especially egregious since there’s no shortage of stories about how great Kobe was as a teenager. We’ve run quite a few of them here on The SportsRush, and this morning, the newest episode of Byron Scott’s Fast Break provided us with another one.
Scott and cohost Jay Wagers were joined by Samaki Walker, a 10-year NBA vet who was drafted four spots ahead of Kobe in 1996. Walker admitted that it felt a bit crazy considering Kobe would go on to become one of the very best players of all time, and he gave credit to then-Lakers general manager Jerry West for seeing something special in Kobe.
“I think [West] was the only person to see his greatness ahead of the game,” he said. “So shoutout to ‘The Logo,’ nobody saw that coming.”
Kobe used to destroy people when he attended Lower Merion High School in Philadelphia, and he was the son of a former eight-year NBA vet. Perhaps other executives were leery of taking a 17-year-old to play in a man’s league, but credit to West, one of the best talent evaluators of all time, for seeing what Kobe could become.
As Scott told it, all it took was one workout for West to see what he needed to see. “I remember when Jerry West worked Kobe Bryant out,” he said. “And he brought Michael Cooper to work him out with, because Coop was such a great defensive player. But at this time Coop was probably 39, 40 years old.”
“Coop said he was so impressed with the kid at 17 years old. Wherever Jerry told him to get to, he got to. He said, ‘I want you to get to that spot over there and take a shot,’ and Coop is guarding him not to let him get to that spot, and Coop said, ‘B, he got to that spot damn near every time, and got his shot off, every time.'”
It will take a fan of a certain age to remember how great Michael Cooper was as a defender, but this is a guy who was the defensive backbone of the Showtime Lakers — a five-time champion, eight time All-Defensive player and the 1986-87 Defensive Player of the Year. He may have been a bit long in the tooth by 1996, but not enough that a teenager should have been able to dust him like that.
Scott continued, “I remember when that workout was over, [West] came to me and he said, ‘Young man, I just seen the best workout I’ve ever seen in my life.”
The Lakers’ own first-round pick wasn’t until 24, where they eventually took Derek Fisher. But West engineered a masterstroke of a trade that sent Vlade Divac to the Hornets for Kobe at 13, and in so doing, freed up the cap space to sign Shaquille O’Neal away from the Magic less than four weeks later.
It’s difficult to imagine a GM ever having a better month than that, and all it took was one workout to convince West of the correct path. What were the rest of the leagues scouts and GMs doing that they couldn’t see Kobe’s greatness? We may never know.
