Former NBA Champion Recalls Confronting Kobe Bryant For Elbowing His Neck

Metta Sandiford-Artest is a cult hero among Lakers fans. The forward played a pivotal role in the team’s title win in 2010 and is fondly remembered for it to this day. However, that wasn’t the case until the summer he joined the team. In fact, in the 2009 playoffs, they cheered as he got ejected for getting into an altercation with Kobe Bryant after the guard elbowed the then-Rockets star in Game 2 of the Western Conference Semi-Finals.

On Byron Scott’s Fast Break podcast, Artest recalled the incident and claimed his bad reputation got him ejected, while Bryant’s terrific image helped him avoid getting charged with a flagrant foul for the elbow. He said,

“I know [Kobe’s] going to get calls. But when you blatantly see an elbow [and do nothing], I just like it’s unfair. So if the ref wasn’t going to handle it, I said, ‘Cool. I’ll handle it.’ And I didn’t expect to get ejected… All I did was go up to Kobe and say, ‘My brother, that was wrong.’ I was upset. He threw an elbow!”

Late in the fourth quarter, Bryant and Artest were jostling under the rim for a rebound when the Lakers superstar swung his elbow and hit the Rockets forward in the neck. Astonishing the referees called a loose ball foul on the two-time Defensive Player of the Year, which left him incensed.

He confronted one of the officials before approaching Bryant, who raised his hands in the air and refused to engage with Artest. Referee Joey Crawford stepped in between the two players and separated them, but the forward was still fuming. He pointed at Bryant and gestured that he had elbowed him.

However, the referees deemed that he was threatening the guard with a throat-slitting gesture and ejected him. That wasn’t the only questionable decision against Artest in the series. In Game 3, the defensive stalwart was charged with a flagrant 2 for a hard foul on Lakers star Pau Gasol.

The decision was woeful and even the commentators criticized the referees for ejecting Artest. The Rockets lost both games and the series in seven games. Despite the horrendous refereeing and the defeat, Metta Sandiford-Artest has fond memories of that seven-game duel against the team he’d joined that summer.