Remembering Kobe Bryant’s final game: Five years later, five untold stories about the Lakers legend’s 60-point night (2024)

As he navigated a gauntlet of cameras, hugs and backslaps, a dazed and delirious Kobe Bryant looked over at John Black, the Lakers’ longtime head of communications, and said, “What the f*ck just happened out there?”

Black replied, “I don’t know, but it sure was fun to watch.”

Half a decade has passed since Bryant finished off his Lakers career with a dizzying final salvo of 60 points on 50 shots. The night of April 13, 2016, stands as one of the most significant and surprising achievements in Bryant’s 20 years.

On that night, he said goodbye to basketball amid an unparalleled celebration. Even as the Lakers limped to the finish line of a 17-win season, the 37-year-old Bryant summoned one final explosion to cap his Hall of Fame career.

Not only did he go out shooting, of course, but he single-handedly carried the Lakers back from a 10-point deficit with two minutes left to also go out with a victory.

What happened out there?

Good question.

Five years later, that performance has become a piece of the foundation of Bryant’s basketball legend. It lives on as his bittersweet farewell in light of the tragedy that followed less than four years later when Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter Gianna were among nine people killed in a helicopter crash.

The Athletic asked five people who were closely involved in Bryant’s final game to share their perspective through their own unique lens: The Fan (Flea); The Teammate (Jordan Clarkson); The Opponent (Shelvin Mack); The Reporter (Lisa Salters); and The Referee (Monty McCutchen).

THE FAN

Of all the celebrities who claim allegiance to the Lakers — and certainly among those who re-emerged at the end of a losing season for Bryant’s final game — few have demonstrated as much loyalty as Flea.

However, as Bryant exploded for 38 points in the second half, including 23 in the fourth quarter, the rock star’s customary seats behind the Lakers bench sat empty.

At that moment, Flea was in Beverly Hills waiting offstage for Lady Gaga to finish her set so he and the rest of the Red Hot Chili Peppers could take the stage and perform at a concert benefiting a new cancer institute.

As he warmed up, Flea, Anthony Kiedis and the rest of the band huddled around phones and computers to catch moments in the game.

“They’re like, ‘Holy sh*t, Kobe scored 40 points,’” Flea said. “HE SCORED 50 POINTS!’”

By the time Bryant drained the free throws that pushed him to 60 points, Flea was already on stage, fulfilling his obligation to a most inconvenient scheduling conflict.

“I definitely felt like a melancholy that I didn’t see it,” he said. “Like, ‘Ahhh, f*ck!’ But at the same time, I was playing for hungry children, you know what I mean?”

It was a whirlwind day for Flea. Bryant had specifically requested he play the national anthem at his final game.

“It meant a lot to me,” Flea said.

Bryant and the rock star were not friends, necessarily. They had crossed paths several times and, Flea said, “He always went out of his way to be appreciative of me. Just kind of letting me know that he appreciated my fandom and that I appreciated him. I just really cared about him.”

When the Chili Peppers concluded their soundcheck that afternoon in Beverly Hills, Flea made the mad dash downtown to rehearse “The Star-Spangled Banner” two hours before tip-off. He had played the anthem numerous times for Lakers games, sometimes on bass guitar, sometimes a bluesy version on trumpet.

This time he delivered a psychedelic, Hendrix-inspired rendition on bass, one he acknowledged “strayed pretty far from the traditional anthem.”

Flea made a point of defending his rendition after social media lit up with critiques.

“I took a lot of liberties harmonically and rhythmically in the way it’s played,” he said. “I did. I think for people, my friends and people who really love music, appreciated that, and hopefully (Kobe) did too.”

After he “came out and rocked it,” Flea and his then-girlfriend went to his seats to watch the first half.

“And then,” he said, “I had to go.”

How does one of the biggest Lakers fans in the world pry himself out of his seat and make his legs move so he can leave in the middle of one of the most memorable moments in franchise history?

“It was heartbreaking,” Flea said. “I did not want to leave. I did not want to leave my seat, but there was no question that I had to do it.”

To this day, he has not watched the second half of that game in its entirety.

He is a fan who only wants to consume basketball live. He has never recorded a game to watch later.

“Once it’s not in real time, it’s not real action,” he said. “It’s just not real to me anymore. If I miss a quarter, I miss a quarter. I never go back.”

When Bryant scored 81 points against Toronto in 2006, Flea was in Australia cursing the slow internet feed that prevented him from witnessing the historic performance. He’s still never watched that one either.

But he’s starting to think he should change that. Maybe he would like to go back and watch the second half of that game, even though he is confident he knows what he’d see.

“He must have been running on fumes,” Flea said. “He must have really been at that certain point you kind of let go of your body and you’re somewhere, channeling some other thing. I’m sure he did that. Just, you know, I’m going for broke. It doesn’t surprise me that he would do that. He was all about giving everything he had.”

When he thinks about Bryant’s last game and the culmination of 20 years in a Lakers uniform, he describes it as “watching this time-lapse photo of this thing blossom. All this amazing talent. The drama and the theatrics.”

How many times did he think the Lakers were out of a game, only for Bryant to come out of nowhere to make an amazing shot, get a stop, make four jumpers in a row?

“It’s phenomenal how fulfilling it was,” Flea said, “just this intangible sense of satisfaction you get from that that carries over into your life. It wasn’t just a game, you built up feelings of this intangible thing that added immeasurably to my spirit. I appreciated his craftsmanship and his ability to stay grounded in the moment, and there it was: the end of it.”

THE TEAMMATE

The Black Mamba was hissing.

When Kobe Bean Bryant wanted the ball, he hissed. Like a snake. And on April 13, 2016, he wanted the damn ball.

In the opening minutes of his final game, however, Bryant could not break the tension that had built inside Staples Center. The sellout crowd wanted a release. A reason to celebrate. But each of Bryant’s first five attempts was a miss. One was an airball.

“I ain’t gonna lie to you,” Jordan Clarkson said, “I got a little nervous. I just was like, ‘Man, we’re literally force-feeding him the ball.’ Even though we were like, ‘All right, we’ve gotta get him the ball when he’s calling for it,’ at that point we were, ‘Everything keeps missing. What else can we do to get him the ball and get him open?’”

Now the likely Sixth Man of the Year for the Utah Jazz, Clarkson looks back on that game as an allegory for Bryant’s entire journey. If you could condense 20 years into 48 minutes, maybe that’s what it would have looked like.

“It was like a glimpse of him in his career, you know what I mean?” Clarkson said.

Bryant’s path to becoming a champion, after all, began with a series of infamous misses: his playoff airballs as a rookie against Utah. Clarkson sees those airballs as a metaphor for Bryant’s clunky start against the Jazz two decades later.

“And then he makes one, and everything just falls in place for him,” he said. “Another 3, another layup, another midrange jump shot, pull-up, post-up, drive and then he goes for 60. That’s how I looked at it. It don’t matter how you start it, don’t matter how many shots you miss, you’ve gotta keep going. And I feel like that’s what his career was really about.”

Clarkson’s own career arc can be traced back to Bryant’s decline. As a rookie in 2014-15, Clarkson became a starter for the Lakers the game after Bryant suffered a torn rotator cuff in the 43rdgame of the year. It was his third season-ending injury in three years. When Bryant returned in 2015-16 for what would become his final campaign, each stop became a celebration of Bryant’s achievements, but those all paled compared to that last night at Staples.

“I remember running onto the court and there had to be like 30 people still on the court, cameras, reporters and celebrities, and we was like, ‘Yo, we still have to warm up and get this game going,’” Clarkson said.

A year ago, former Lakers general manager Mitch Kupchak told The Athletic that Bryant’s final game was especially meaningful because it allowed younger players like Clarkson, D’Angelo Russell, Julius Randle and Larry Nance Jr. the opportunity to get a taste of what it was truly like to play with Bryant.

“That last game showed those kids who he really was,” Kupchak said.

While the focus of those 66 games Bryant played that year was always about him, Clarkson said Bryant made sure to impart certain lessons along the way.

“We didn’t really get a full experience of competing for the playoffs or trying to compete for a championship,” he said, “but he did really try to help us grow as players and as men at the time.”

He remembers the postgame locker room one night in Portland earlier that season when Bryant lit into the Lakers’ young core.

“We got whupped in Portland,” Clarkson said. “He was going at me, Julius and D-Lo, and he was going at us super hard. And we was like, ‘Yo, what’s going on? We only got like 15 wins.’ But that was his way of getting to us and trying to get us to be better. I feel like through that whole year we kept continuing to grow because of him.”

By April 13, the rest of the Lakers were ready to celebrate as well.

The Lakers ultimately had no trouble getting Bryant shots, thanks in part to some overzealous screens set by Randle to free up the outgoing legend.

“Oh, it was illegal as sh*t,” Clarkson said, laughing. “I think the whole world is Kobe fans. Either you love or you hate him, but at the end of the day, you’re still a fan of what he does. I think the refs even let some things slide during that game.”

When Bryant finally arrived in the locker room after all the postgame revelry, his teammates showered him in champagne, a feting that Bryant later jokingly grumbled should be reserved for championships.

“We popped a bunch of bottles of champagne,” Clarkson said. “Guys were coming in the locker room. Kanye. A bunch of people that just filed into the locker room. It was a pretty star-studded locker room at that time.”

Clarkson wouldn’t see anything like that again until 2017 when he was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers and experienced the Finals against the Golden State Warriors.

“It was insane,” Clarkson said. “It was definitely a Finals feel to it, something that we all brought intensity and wanted to get that one win for him. And definitely felt like it after. We were all pretty hype and felt like we won a championship.”

THE OPPONENT

Shelvin Mack chatted idly at center court with Lou Williams, the three-time Sixth Man of the Year who was then a Lakers reserve. Williams was in the middle of a set of jumping jacks —a pregame ritual Mack liked to bust his balls over — when he casually dropped into the conversation a preview for the night’s events.

“Man,” Williams told him, “Kobe’s talking about he’s shooting 50 shots tonight.”

“And I was like, ‘Ain’t no way,’” Mack said. “That’s unheard of.”

He was 48 minutes away from learning just how right Williams had been.

Mack had arrived in Utah from Atlanta in a three-team trade earlier that season and was immediately thrust into a starting role alongside his former Butler University teammate, Gordon Hayward.

Utah went into the night of April 13 on the cusp of a playoff berth but needed Sacramento to beat Houston to have a chance. By the time the Lakers and Jazz tipped off, the Rockets led the Kings by nearly 40.

“Once that happened,” said Mack, who is playing this season with Panathinaikos in Greece, “everyone kind of wanted to see one of the greatest players to ever play the game.”

Like many players of his generation, Mack idolized Bryant. Posters adorned his childhood bedroom. Growing up in Lexington, Ky., he copied Bryant’s workout regimen after seeing it in a commercial.

For much of his pro career, he wore No. 8 in honor of Bryant.

“I think he’s the best player ever,” Mack said. “I’ve got him ahead of Jordan, LeBron. My favorite player growing up. I just liked the style, the way he played. Obviously, as I got older, I realized I didn’t have Kobe’s game in my game, so I adapted. But I loved watching him play.”

To this day, he will log on to YouTube and study Bryant’s moves.

The night of Bryant’s final game, Nike gave all players in the game a pair of Bryant’s signature sneakers, black with gold accents including the date: 4.13.16.

During a free throw, Mack asked Bryant if he would autograph his pair of shoes.

“I knew how hectic it would be and impossible after the game,” Mack said, “so I asked him in the middle of the game. He was like, ‘Yeah, send the shoes over.’”

Seemingly everyone wanted something from Kobe that night. Mack figured his request would get lost in the shuffle.

“But two weeks later, I had the Kobes sent back to me,” Mack said, “signed by him.”

The entire night was a peculiar juxtaposition for the Jazz. They were eliminated from postseason contention, which was a bummer. And they lost the game. Another gut shot. But they also had the privilege of participating in this once-in-a-lifetime event that many still hold as a life highlight.

Mack called it one of the 10 greatest moments in a career that includes playing in the NCAA title game— twice.

“The aura in the arena was something like I never felt before,” Mack said.

He still marvels at the support Bryant had from his teammates.

“It was all about him,” he said. “They had a wide-open layup, they let him shoot it and score. Some people had wide-open shots, but they kept swinging the ball, and they just let him play.”

The Lakers had one mission: Get Bryant buckets.

“A lot of people think we let him score,” Mack said. “That we let him do that. We were playing hard. He was one of the best players to ever do it, he left it all on the court. He was able to make some incredible plays. Everything he got that game he earned. It wasn’t anything like we weren’t going to play hard his last game. Nah. We was trying to play hard and win.”

On the flight home, the Jazz busted each other’s chops over letting Bryant score 60. Mack likes to point out that none of Bryant’s 22 field goals came against him, a claim that a cursory video review confirmed.

“It’s true,” Mack said. “If you want to count a pick-and-roll that he scored on a big, I don’t know. But just scoring period? He didn’t score. I wouldn’t say it was my defense, but it just happened to work out.”

For a devoted Kobe fan, that’s as good as it gets. In addition to the sneakers, Mack blew up a photo of himself and Bryant and hung it in his man cave at home in Atlanta. In it, Mack is guarding Bryant near the purple No. 8 that had been painted on the floor.

“Just me and him,” Mack said. “Somehow no one else was in the photo.”

Occasionally, friends will text Mack to let him know the game is airing on cable. He’ll sit and watch it sometimes. But what he really wants is for his kids to be able to watch it with him.

Mack has a 5-year-old daughter as well as a son who’s 3.

“I’m just waiting for the point in time my son gets a little older, my daughter gets a little older, and I can actually sit and tell the story,” he said.

That story will start with Lou Williams not breaking rhythm during a set of jumping jacks as he tells their dad that Kobe Bryant was going to shoot the ball 50 times.

And how the dad doesn’t believe it.

“Sure enough,” Mack said, “he came out and did it.”

THE REPORTER

As Bryant addressed the Staples Center crowd at center court, Lisa Salters positioned herself off to the side, anticipating his next move. This was an interview she was absolutely not going to miss.

“I remember before the game they said he’s not going to do a postgame interview with ESPN,” Salters said. “And I was like, ‘Yeah right.’ I was like, ‘I will kick his ass if he doesn’t do an interview with me.’”

Indeed, after Bryant delivered the now iconic coda to his career —“What can I say? Mamba out.” — he turned and dropped to his knees to hug Gigi. He kissed Natalia and Vanessa.

The next person he encountered was Salters. Bryant saw the veteran ESPN sideline reporter and lit up with a smile.

“I was like, ‘Kobe c’mon,’” Salters recalled. “He was like, ‘Of course I’ll do it with you.’”

Salters spent nearly two decades staking out Bryant for interviews, developing a friendship with the superstar along the way. A fixture on the sidelines for ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” broadcasts and on weekend NBA games on ABC, Salters would not have generally been tapped to work this Wednesday night game on ESPN2.

But during the NFL season months earlier, Mike Tirico had told her he had angled for play-by-play duties and she should try to get assigned to it as well. It was an obvious choice.

“I considered him a friend and just wanted to be there for one more time,” Salters said. “Think of all the years, the Laker games, the years they were great. I was in L.A. for all those ABC games every weekend. So, we got to know each other, got to be friends. And when I think about Kobe I don’t really think about the basketball. I really think about all the life stuff.”

When she adopted her son, Sam, in 2013, she said Bryant was one of the first people to whom she sent a photo. On the day of his last game, she had a case of wine delivered to him. And she consciously and happily violated one of the most fundamental rules of sports journalism.

She wore purple.

“I try not to wear the colors of either team playing because I never want anyone to say, ‘Oh, you’re pulling for that team,’” Salters said. “But I wore purple that night for Kobe.”

Going into the day, the ESPN crew had to prep for a game with actual stakes. Salters prepared to provide balanced coverage of two competing storylines. But that plan was scrapped after Houston’s 35-point rout of Sacramento took care of the Jazz’s playoff hopes.

“Once that was not an issue it really was really just a big farewell,” she said. “Just a big kiss to Kobe. So it was easier in that sense. You knew that every question you asked in the game was going to be about Kobe, in some shape or fashion.”

In the first half, Tirico threw it to Salters for an in-game interview with Jack Nicholson in his courtside seat. The three-time Academy Award winner was identified on the chyron as simply, “Jack.”

It was a first for Salters.

“Jack is just unapproachable,” she said. “Everybody knows that unwritten rule: Don’t talk to Jack. Let the man watch the game.”

This, however, was a special night. Everyone was enjoying the ride.

That was true of no one individual more than Kobe himself.

When Bryant came in for his pregame interview with Salters, Tirico and analyst Hubie Brown, she said, he was all smiles.

“It was like his wedding day,” she said. “Just happy.”

She was struck by how comfortable Bryant was with the whole extravaganza. He was at peace with his decision to leave the game. She chatted with him briefly at halftime, another divergence from the norm, and asked how he could possibly focus on playing.

He said he was enjoying it. All of it.

“That’s the only time I’ve talked to a player at halftime,” she said. “I don’t think we’re allowed to, really. I figured they’d make an exception for that game.”

Even though he finished with 60 points, Salters had covered enough of Bryant’s marquee matchups over the years to know what qualified as a good shot for him.

“If he had made the shots that normally go in for him, he could have had 80,” she said.

After Salters concluded her on-court interview with Bryant, she leaned in to speak briefly to Vanessa Bryant. She wanted to congratulate her too.

“I just could only imagine how great it is knowing like this is all over and we get to be normal people and have our family life,” she recalled. “That’s what sticks with me now, is just remembering how happy they all were. And being like, this is going to be the next great part of their lives. They were just going to be able to chill for 40, 50 years and enjoy each other.”

Salters rewatched the game last week for the first time. She tends to move on from games as soon as they’re over, and that night she was on a redeye back to Baltimore to get home to Sam, leaving so many details behind in Los Angeles.

“So, when you look back at it now knowing that he’s gone and knowing that Gianna’s gone,” she said, “I’m glad that I went back and watched the game because it just reminded me of how happy they all were.”

THE REFEREE

Monty McCutchen was nearing the end of his 23rd season in the NBA, crisscrossing the country to work 64 games over six months, when his assignments for the last week of the regular season came in.

April 13: Lakers vs. Jazz at Staples Center.

“It didn’t dawn on me immediately that it was Kobe’s last game,” McCutchen said.

There were so many logistical matters to attend to before he could even make the connections. Booking hotels, scheduling meetings with the other referees once they got into town.

“Then it started to sink into you,” McCutchen said. “‘Wow, this is the last day of the season, I’ve got the Lakers, that means it’s Kobe’s last game. Then of course it hits you that you’ve been entrusted with something important and to be entrusted with that there’s a sense of really wanting to live up to that moment.”

McCutchen refereed 1,455 games over 25 seasons before transitioning into a role as the league’s vice president of referee development and training in 2018. That is more than 100 more games than Bryant played. Of those, a few games stand out.

In his second year, he was assigned to a game between the Chicago Bulls and New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden on March 28, 1995. Ten days before the game, Michael Jordan announced his return from baseball.

“They would never have assigned me that game,” McCutchen said, “but they assigned it and then he came back.”

Jordan proceeded to pour in 55 points that game.

“I can distinctly remember the great people that were there,” he said. “Ed Bradley. Tom Brokaw. I can remember them straining their necks to get a glimpse of Michael when he came out of the tunnel.”

It was much the same two decades later at Staples Center, when celebrities formed a thick ring around the court in the build-up to the game. Only instead of Brokaw, it was Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine he noticed.

McCutchen couldn’t help himself.

Recognizing the historic moment at hand, McCutchen’s wife, Terri, had accompanied her husband from their Asheville, N.C., home to attend Bryant’s last game. The couple had met at UCLA when McCutchen was admitted to a Folklore and Mythology program that he blew off to pursue refereeing.

It just so happens that Terri McCutchen loves Adam Levine.

“Hey,” McCutchen said, walking over to Levine before the game. “Stay away from section 117.”

McCutchen chuckled at the memory.

“He’s like, ‘Huh, what?’ He doesn’t know me, I’m just having some fun before the game,” McCutchen said. He proceeded to explain the circ*mstances to the singer.

Everyone got a good laugh about it until McCutchen whistled Bryant for a reach-in foul with a minute left in the first quarter.

From his courtside seat, Levine bellowed at McCutchen, “What section was that again?”

In the lifespan of an NBA referee, there are moments like that, the ones that are guaranteed to get a good response at a party.

For McCutchen, who grew up in the small town of Hico, Texas, the son of a cultural anthropologist who used a horse as collateral to pay for Monty’s first refereeing camp many decades ago, there was the sense of hard work paying off to be part of such a grand moment.

“To see a lot of that come to fruition is always very humbling to me,” McCutchen said. “I don’t take it for granted that good things happen haphazardly. You have to really grind.”

For the most part, it is a job performed in the shadows. Good referees don’t make the game about them.

“I remember talking to the crew about this,” McCutchen said. “You had to respect the game and all the participants, because you wanted to make sure that you weren’t trying to be part of history, that you were the recipient of being part of history.”

That meant that any suggestion that the referees, like the Utah Jazz, were in cahoots to send Bryant out with a bang, were misguided.

“I can tell you this,” McCutchen said. “You lessen his achievement if you don’t apply the standards. Now we might have missed a play. You can fill books with my mistakes. But this idea that you would have this moment like, ‘Oh, that’s Kobe;’ that’s not how you spend 25 years training your brain.”

As the game progressed, McCutchen waited for a chance to share a quiet moment with Bryant, something he tries to do with all players on their way out of the league, not just the stars. Between free throws, he told Bryant that he appreciated that their interactions over the years had been authentic. Not only had McCutchen refereed countless regular-season games featuring Bryant, but also he had been on the court for three Finals games, including games 2 and 6 of the 2010 Finals.

“He was a true, true champion at competition,” McCutchen said. “Not just as a champion with the Lakers, but he was a champion in competition.”

McCutchen started to get a sense that Bryant was authoring a special night, but he didn’t know quite how special until near the end of the fourth quarter when he heard a fan yell, “Go for 60, Kobe!”

“I was never someone that looked up and saw the individual stuff,” McCutchen said. “You’re looking up at team fouls. You’re doing the work.”

But when the buzzer ended, McCutchen had the wherewithal to grab a box score and slip it into his luggage to take back to Asheville.

“I had enough knowledge to realize that could be a memory,” McCutchen said.

He is not generally a sentimental collector. His home is not adorned with NBA memorabilia. In fact, when he got home, he stuffed the box score into a filing cabinet labeled, “Referee Memories,” that encapsulates his entire collection.

“It’s got like seven things in it,” he said, “three of which are from the CBA.”

That night at Staples Center was the last time McCutchen and Bryant saw each other for several years. They didn’t cross paths again until the 2019 WNBA All-Star Game in Las Vegas, when Bryant was in attendance with Gianna, a burgeoning hoops prodigy who loved learning from her dad.

This was just six months before the accident that would claim both of their lives.

“When I went up to him,” McCutchen said, “I was caught off guard because he truly embraced me. He grabbed me and embraced me.”

For McCutchen, who prided himself in being an even-handed official and not ingratiating himself with individual stars, this was a certain validation of his life’s work.

“You were doing the work that had a bonding capability to it,” McCutchen remembered thinking.

He was processing that thought in real time when Bryant introduced him to his basketball-crazed companion.

“He turned to me and introduced me to Gianna, who was sitting right there and…,” McCutchen’s voice trailed off. “I mean, f*ck, I …”

He fought back tears as the memory flooded back. When he spoke again, his voice broke with emotion.

“It meant something then,” he said. “He took the time to introduce me to his daughter. And then in retrospect, of course, it’s painful. It was brief, just like the rest of our career. It wasn’t like we sat around for 30 minutes. But it felt real.

“And I have a strong memory of that.”

(Top photo: Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images)