Kobe Bryant turns 35 today, and the well wishes have been pouring in.
https://twitter.com/paugasol/statuses/370872004481933312
https://twitter.com/MagicJohnson/statuses/370939156849229824
I’m sure Kobe Bryant has spent his birthday rehabbing his Achilles for 12 hours, but hopefully he spends a few minutes to enjoy it.
For us, here is the NBA’s official Top 10 plays of Kobe’s career. It includes some great stuff — a dunk over Steve Nash, buzzer beaters and more. My favorite: the alley-oop to Shaq in the fourth quarter of Game 7 of the 2000 Western Conference Finals that became the signature play of that team. Watch that play again — Kobe absolutely freezes a good defender in Scottie Pippen with a crossover and that gets him into the lane and sets up the play.
We’re lucky. We get to live in an era with some just amazing basketball talent on the court, guys with amazing gifts we get to watch. We — media, fans, society – can become too obsessed with rings, with celebrity, with all the periphery that we forget to really enjoy this great era of the NBA. We need to stop and just soak in the beauty of the game sometimes. Kobe is just a fun, entertaining scorer to watch. You don’t have to like Kobe (or LeBron or Durant or anyone else) but if you really are a fan of the game take a moment to savor just how fun it is to get to watch these guys do what they do in an era when the game is brought to us wherever we are on the globe.
Happy birthday Kobe.
