Bryant pick rates as best
Twelve players were taken before him in the '96 NBA draft. Name them quick before they fade from memory.
Mark Whicker
The Orange County Register
The NBA draft is not that hard.
Oscar Robertson, Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Elgin Baylor, Elvin Hayes, David Robinson, Shaquille O'Neal, Hakeem Olajuwon, Tim Duncan, James Worthy, Bill Walton and LeBron James were all picked first.
Bill Russell, Jerry West, Rick Barry and Isiah Thomas were No. 2 picks. Michael Jordan and Bob Cousy went third.
Charles Barkley, fifth. Larry Bird was sixth, because he was drafted with one college season to go.
Kobe Bryant went 13th.
As he hungrily waits for his fourth NBA championship to arrive like a y pizza, Bryant will be the recipient of all sorts of new, largely ceremonial les.
What he can rationally claim, were he so inclined, is that he was the best selection in the history of the NBA draft.
We all know, or think we know, how this happened.
Bryant came out of Lower Merion High, in suburban Philadelphia, in 1996, and agent Arn Tellem basically nudged him into the trembling hands of West, the Lakers general manager.
Charlotte took Bryant at 13, and when Tellem informed the Hornets that the prospect of Bryant even joining a layup line in NASCAR country was "an impossibility," they traded him to the Lakers for Vlade Divac.
That gave West enough salary-cap freedom to sign Shaquille O'Neal that very week.
Bryant also turned down a chance to work out for Sacramento. He did meet with New Jersey, but Tellem wasn't very bullish on that either.
At the time the Divac/Bryant trade was widely judged as a coup for Charlotte. And some NBA teams considered Bryant just too farfetched a gamble, even with Tellem's maneuverings.
He was a high school kid, 17 in fact. Kevin Garnett was a high school kid, but he also was 6-foot-11. The world still believed the myth of college basketball, that it was the only highway to the pros, that the invaluable tutelage of a micro-managing college coach was a prerequisite, not just an option.
"They're saying Kobe Bryant can play for the Lakers. We don't know if he can play for North Carolina," huffed CBS college hoop analyst Billy Packer. He was only a bit more spectacularly wrong than everyone else.
What is clear now, and was clear to West then, is that Bryant should have gone first.
Philadelphia had that first pick. Brad Greenberg, now the head coach at Radford U., was the 76ers' general manager. He knew all about Kobe.
"We met with him at Penn and worked him out," Greenberg recalled the other day. "Not in The Palestra, but in a little gym behind their offices. He was a great kid, but a kid. Wore his sunglasses up on his head. He was very positive. We got no indication that he would refuse to play for us.
"And he had a tremendous workout. We worked out Allen Iverson, Stephon Marbury, Ray Allen and Kobe, and until Iverson's last workout, Kobe had the best one."
But it was the No. 1 pick. You don't do the No. 1 pick on spec. The Sixers took Iverson, and he did much to revive the franchise, even taking them to the NBA Finals in 2001. Where they lost to the Lakers, and Bryant.
"We didn't want to take Kobe with the first pick," Greenberg said. "Now, we did give some thought to trading down and getting him with a lower pick. We could have done that. But we had just taken Jerry Stackhouse the year before. The club had dealt away some high picks in years past. They traded the first pick to Cleveland (where it became Brad Daugherty) and got Roy Hinson, which didn't turn out well. So our feeling was that we had to keep all the high picks we could."
Some of the other pre-Bryant picks require explanation. Some are just beyond it.
Toronto took Marcus Camby second. Vancouver took Shareef Abdur-Rahim third. Milwaukee chose Marbury and Minnesota Allen, and then they traded with each other.
No. 6 was Antoine Walker, to Boston. The Clippers ... ah, the Clippers. They chose Lorenzen Wright.
New Jersey got Kerry Kittles with No. 8 and Dallas took Samaki Walker at 9. Sudden thought: Is that really why Bryant slapped Walker on a Laker bus?
The next three picks were centers: Erick Dampier, Todd Fuller and Vitaly Potapenko, to Indiana, Golden State and Cleveland.
Then came Bryant.
Eleven picks later, West chose Derek Fisher.
It was a rich draft. Peja Stojakovic and Steve Nash were the next two picks after Kobe, and Jermaine O'Neal was two picks after that.
Allen, Camby and Dampier are the only players picked ahead of Bryant who start in this league today when healthy. Kittles, both Walkers, Potapenko and Abdur-Rahim are no longer in the league.
They can all brag that their names got called before Kobe Bryant.
Just not as often.
That's an interesting take...I never thought about it.
You could definitely say Kobe Bryant at #13 was the best value draft pick ever.
And by trading for Kobe, the Lakers were able to dump Divac's salary and pick up Shaq. That was an outstanding job by Jerry West....two superstars in one move.
Shaq, Kobe, and Fisher all in the same year
The Logo is a God
Getting Gasol to LA was still West's best move ever, since he wasn't even supposed to be working for the Lakers at the time.
Good article though, I agree to some extent
Just gotta wait for the conspiracy homers to come in and claim the Kobe trade was collusion
How did the agent keep kobe from going to the team that drafted him though? Any law-nerds explain that to me please?
It's like the second he stepped onto the nba court, he wanted to go out of his way to prove he would redefine the term "spoiled ".
Time to move on with your life.
LMAO Lorenzen Wright. Go Clippers.
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