NBA Notes: Kobe Bryant is getting ready to depart today.
You kind of expect Kobe Bryant to spend his preseason talking about how excited he is to play alongside a point guard of Nash’s talents and to groom Howard as the next signature star in the Lakers’ illustrious history.
Additionally, you kind of expect Bryant to take aim at a sixth NBA title, which would tie him on the all-time list with prototype killer shooting guard and all-time great Michael Jordan.
Bryant enters the season with his Los Angeles Lakers once again entrenched among the unquestioned heavyweights of the NBA, thanks to offseason deals that brought Dwight Howard and Steve Nash to join Pau Gasol in a starting lineup that’s likely to give opponents fits. And he is doing that, to be fair. However, he’s also
touching on a topic that’s likely to be a bit less thrilling to Lakers fans: the approaching end of his first-ballot Hall of Fame career.
Bryant has two years and $58.3 million remaining on the contract he signed in 2010, a three-year extension that runs through the end of the 2013-14 season. At that point, he’ll be just shy of his 36th birthday, and at that point, as he told Ken Berger of CBSSports.com, he thinks he’s probably going to be done.
Speaking with CBSSports.com in a quiet moment after practice, Bryant conceded that, in all likelihood, the finish line and the conclusion of his current contract will be one in the same. Bryant has two years left, and though he was careful to point out, “One can never be too sure,” he made it clear in the next breath that it’s almost unfathomable he would play beyond 2013–14, which would be his 18th season.
“It’s just that three more years seems like a really long time to continue to stay at a high, high level of training, preparation and health,” Bryant said. “That’s a lot of years. For a guard? That’s a lot of years.”
“It’s not about health necessarily,” he said. “It’s about, ‘Do I want to do it? Do I have that hunger to continue to prepare at a high level?'”
Bryant’s comments track with the attitude he expressed several months ago during a lengthy interview with Yahoo! Sports’ Graham Bensinger, during which he identified the final year of his current contract as a likely stopping point: “I don’t know if I’ll play any longer than that.”
The 18-season mark represents rarefied air among elite NBA players, especially, as Kobe notes, among guards. While a handful of Hall of Fame big men (Moses Malone, Robert Parish, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Karl Malone, and Hakeem Olajuwon) played 18 or more seasons, only two backcourt players enshrined in Springfield have done so: John Stockton, inducted in 2009 following a 19-year career with the Utah Jazz, and Reggie Miller, inducted last month after an 18-year run (mostly off screens) with the Indiana Pacers.
With 18 years in the books and three more coming, thanks to the New York Knicks, Jason Kidd will join Stockton and Reggie when he hangs ’em up; if new running buddies Nash and Ray Allen (16 years down each) finish out their new contracts, they’ll likely do the same. But among guards, that’s it; that’s the list. And considering all Bryant’s accomplished in his career and the fact that none of the other four guards were relied upon to be their team’s primary scoring threat until the bitter end, it seems pretty reasonable to slot Kobe in at the top of that list, number one with a bullet, a jaw-jut and a contested jumper that somehow goes in.
