The late great Kobe Bryant has a basketball resume that has been matched or exceeded by very few, and he is one of only a select handful of all-time great athletes to play his whole career with one team.
But there were two times in which he nearly left his beloved Los Angeles Lakers. One came when he infamously demanded a trade in 2007, and the other came three years earlier.
In 2004, the Lakers had just lost to the Detroit Pistons in the NBA Finals. There were signs all season that their dynasty was on its last legs, and there was speculation that Bryant, head coach Phil Jackson and even Shaquille O’Neal could leave.
Bryant became a free agent that summer, and even right after O’Neal was traded, he wasn’t sure he wanted to return to the Lakers.
According to former Lakers executive Jerry West, Bryant considered signing with the Memphis Grizzlies, the team West was working for at the time. But West said he talked the shooting guard out of it (h/t Lakers Daily).
Kobe on the Grizzlies?? It almost happened 👀
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“He became a free agent, and his agent then was Rob Pelinka,” West recalled. “So, I met them in Orange County in a hotel room, and he said he wanted to come to Memphis and play basketball. And I looked at him, and I said, ‘You kidding me?’ And he said, ‘No.’ And I said, ‘Kobe, no, no, you belong somewhere out here, OK?’ And even though he woulda never played there, I just wanted to reassure him that — don’t feel like you have any obligation with me or the Grizzlies to play here. I guess in some sense, that might have been tampering. I didn’t look at it as tampering because he was at our house all the time. He ate at my house a lot. I felt more like a father figure with him.”
It was advice that was bad for a Grizzlies team that, at the time, was starting to achieve respectability, but it turned out to be a blessing for a beleaguered Lakers franchise.
Bryant heeded West’s advice and remained in the Purple and Gold on a new contract that summer. Although the team went through three painful years of rebuilding, the arrival of Pau Gasol in 2008 immediately led to three straight NBA Finals appearances and back-to-back world championships, including one over its archrival Boston Celtics.
Against seemingly all odds, Bryant’s career had a happy storybook ending.
