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After trailing 60-45 in game 7 of the first round, kobe inexplicably took 3 shots and scored 1 point. In kobes own words, he would rather go 0-30 than 0-9 because the latter means you psyched yourself out and beat yourself.

I'm not a fan of Kobe, but he doesn't strike me like the kind of player to simply quit in the middle of a game.

At that time he was getting a lot of flak for shooting too much so this was interpreted as a response to that. While this seems out of place for a game 7, so does only taking 3 shots in the first half, especially with that roster.

Yeah Kobe quit and Kobe is an idiot for quitting, he could have won a championship

Wow this is a random thread - Kobe was a stubborn dude, he was obviously trying to prove a point. But this was a LONG time ago and he won like 2 chips after so...

I think him and Phil were in cahoots on that to show ownership the kind of roster they had to drag to the playoffs. Phil more than Kobe was into that kind of mind games.

Not sure i would call it quitting but he was clearly trying to make a point of not shooting. I believe that may have been in response to some of his teammates complaining about shots. It was extremely weird to watch.

Lakers had no chance in that series after they let game 6 slip away. Tim Thomas 3 still haunts me to this day.

Did he quit game 4 too, when he took 14 shots?

Yes he quit. He was defering to scrubs. It was really bad but he lost the battle to win the war IMO. He showed the world 'these scrubs only go as far as I take em'

It was stupid because everybody already knew that and they coulda won that game. But oh well. They were R2 fodder regardless.

The criticism is he didn't take shots in the 4th quarter right. Just watch the first 5 minutes of the 4th quarter. Kobe called for the ball a few times and doesn't get it. And basically every time Kobe gets the ball, he's doubled and makes the pass.

They were already down 20 entering the 4th. That Laker team just wasn't any good.

People are going to try to rewrite history because of his tragic death, but the answer is yes, he did quit on his team. He left them hanging out to dry. Some people here have actually kept it honest. He (deservedly) caught a lot of crap for it at the time.

Anfernee1 wrote:Yeah Kobe quit and Kobe is an idiot for quitting, he could have won a championship

think you forgot green font....that team had Smush Parker and Kawame Brown as starters

The answer is no.

Kobe answered this to Charles Barkley (It was the game plan). Watch the video below. /thread
.

yes he quit. loser. let's never speak of him again.

Liam_Gallagher wrote:Lakers had no chance in that series after they let game 6 slip away. Tim Thomas 3 still haunts me to this day.

Watch on YouTube

Yea for the life of me, i still couldnt believe how LOdom didnt box out like his life depended on it for a game winning rebound, but instead went up weakly and let Marion son him so easily for the O board. LOdom was always such a solid rebounder, but it looked like he was daydreaming there.... or he thought Nash's shot was going to be the last one and didnt bother to rebound.

Yea the Lakers werent gonna go anywhere that year, but had they won that series and Kobe had another excellent (albeit losing) series, it would at least have helped burnish Kobe's legacy a bit on his ability to carry a weak team past a 1st round.

dautjazz wrote:I'm not a fan of Kobe, but he doesn't strike me like the kind of player to simply quit in the middle of a game.

This is the great trick Kobe pulled. People are so used to thinking about Kobe as a never-say-die-ultra-competitor that they don't tend to realize that he very much had a tendency to give up on lost causes, sometimes before they were completely lost.

This was something that was the case that I tend to see as beginning with Shaq who was Mr. Lose-by-getting-Swept. In fairness to Shaq, while he was loaf-prone, the issue with him in series doesn't seem to be that he'd actually put up bad numbers, but that if the opponent figured out a way to win Plan A vs Plan A, the series was over.

With Kobe, there are multiple cases where Kobe really seemed to lose series in a way that "proved a point".

In the case of the 2006 series against the Suns, I do think the reality is that after almost winning the series earlier, the Lakers went into Game 7 essentially expecting that the Suns had already won the series so we shouldn't act like it was all on Kobe. However, Phil Jackson did go into the series with a game plan using an attack not based around Kobe, and it really felt like by the 2nd half of Game 7 Kobe was doing a "You thought you could win without me scoring a ton, alright, see if the other guys can dig us out of the hole" message.

I worry that Kobe supporters are going to see all this as just hatred of Kobe, but what I'll say is that Kobe won the narrative war like few athletes in history, and he's essentially the patron saint of Los Angeles now. He spent his entire career trying to create an image that would make him an icon, and he played it all perfectly. He's a hero now to people who don't even care about basketball.

By contrast, KD is also someone who has tried to play a game like this and it's blown up in his face repeatedly leaving him prone to tantrums that only make it worse. Kobe knew what he was doing when he picked his battles on a level most superstar talents did not.

Tim Kempton wrote:People are going to try to rewrite history because of his tragic death, but the answer is yes, he did quit on his team. He left them hanging out to dry. Some people here have actually kept it honest. He (deservedly) caught a lot of crap for it at the time.

Watch the 4th quarter of that game posted above. Kobe gets doubled at the 3pt line basically every time he touched the ball

i remember highly anticipating this game but i wasn't able to watch it. i called my dad, who had watched it, to see how it went (didn't have internet on my phone then) and when he told me the score i almost fell over. blowout?!

but yeah, the common folklore associated with this game is that kobe deferred to his crappy teammates to show management that you get what you pay for it, or something like that.

One thing I absolutely do not miss about the Kobe Bryant era is debating his shot totals on a given night. Too many? Too few? It was just exhausting, and yet it was so frequently the single biggest issue, even when we were winning. Bouncing back and forth from "holy sh*t that was amazing" to "WTF are you doing?" with almost no middle ground.