Kobe Bryant Waves Farewell to Boston

With the Los Angeles Lakers visiting the Boston Celtics tonight, you might have thought it’d be a brief respite from the Kobe Bryant Farewell Tour. It was part of the Celtics’ first of three court surfaces; the current floor was installed before this season.

During that time, Celtics fans only cheered for Bryant when he collected fouls or missed shots.

Bryant had 15 points and 11 rebounds, and the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Celtics 112-104 on Wednesday night.

In fact, Bryant wholeheartedly believes he’ll be back in Boston once he’s retired. So I wanted to take them to a game. “We knew we would take one of them because we needed help right away and all six of those guys were prepared to help right away, whereas Kobe, we knew we’d have to wait”. “She was crying, she was mad”. Obviously they know to root for the Celtics, I’m a responsible parent after all. That was when I said, ‘I have to figure this leadership thing out. “That’s the kind of profound impact this building has had”. And so this place is always special to me. “Here it is a little different because this is the city that drafted me”.

“Because of the history”, said Bryant. We had to deal with the Spurs, we had to deal with (Sacramento), so many teams we had to deal with in the West. When that came to be it was like woah, this would be pretty cool. “I’ll be doing that quite a bit tonight”.

Kobe Bryant talks about how much he hates Boston Celtics green and how he cherished beating the Celtics in the NBA Finals. That’s just how sports are.

But here is more of what happened, in my view: Yes, at the start of the game, the cheers for Bryant were unanimous and authentic and appropriate.

Bryant’s final game in Boston will come against a team that hardly resembles those Celtics squads. That’s about as complex as I could get with them at this point so I left it there and focused on getting them to the game. It really was. And Bryant loved it.

Besides the fact that a good team like the Celtics should be asking itself questions as to how they managed to lose to such an terrible team and even allow them to score 112 points, there’s Bryant going back to some bad numbers, with the Lakers hoping this was the exception, not a return to the norm of his earlier games this season.

“I’m bringing my family down, because my kids have never been to Boston”, Bryant told reporters following Monday’s loss in Charlotte. I remember it as a lovely moment because it helped me find the best version of myself and my teammates. I grew up watching Paul Pierce develop into an National Basketball Association star and eventually saw the making of a big three that would lead to much of the joy in my life from 2007-2013.