Looking back on Kobe Bryant’s greatest showing of Mamba Mentality

As tributes pour in for one of the NBA’s greatest ever, here’s a look back at what may very well be the pinnacle of Kobe Bryant’s Mamba Mentality.

The Los Angeles Lakers had arrived at the 2012-13 season with a championship on their mind. Anything less for a team led by Kobe Bryant was unacceptable, but this season was a bit different than the two that had followed their back-to-back title years.

Following a five-game defeat at the hands of the Oklahoma City Thunder the previous playoffs, L.A. had impressively retooled its talented but lacking roster.

A scarce point guard position was filled by Steve Nash coming off what would be his final All-Star appearance. An August blockbuster trade sent out Andrew Bynum, but brought back the game’s best big man in Dwight Howard.

Five former or current All-Stars comprised their starting lineup and another in Antawn Jamison came off the bench.

The Miami Heat had previously made superteams cool. The Lakers were simply following suit in a way that made them prime competitors for the defending champs.

Fast forward to March 28, a time when most contenders are shifting into a higher gear, but the Lakers remained in an unexpected free fall.

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Mike Brown had been fired following a 1-4 start to this highly anticipated season. Mike D’Antoni was brought in to bring Showtime back to Los Angeles but couldn’t, not with Nash, his former MVP point guard, being limited to just 50 games.

The chemistry between Kobe and Dwight was non-existent. Pau Gasol was putting up career-lows across the board in a fluctuating role alongside a big man more established than he.

Following a 10-point loss to the Milwaukee Bucks, L.A. was just half a game ahead of the Utah Jazz for the eighth and final playoff spot in the Western Conference.

A title for this fractured superteam already seemed out of the question, but an absence from the postseason would place the disappointment on an entirely different level, one the sheer talent of the roster alone should’ve been able to avoid.

Kobe knew what that meant. He also had an incredible belief in his abilities to carry the Lakers. It’s why he made a postseason guarantee back in February, despite being 3½ games out.

It was that loss to Milwaukee — the Lakers’ fourth loss in five games — that sparked something in Kobe.

He was done operating within the team concept that had played a part in this woeful under-performance. He had made a declaration and was finished trying to rely on others, despite their noteworthy talent, to make it happen.

Over their next seven games, the Lakers registered six wins to keep Utah at bay and Kobe’s fingerprints were everywhere, in the form of 28.9 points, 8.4 assists, 7.3 rebounds, 2.1 steals and 1.0 blocks per game.

Kobe had this incredible desire to reach the ceiling of everything he attempted. His Mamba Mentality was second to none, resulting in countless stories of work ethic and improbable feats of overcoming what would cripple an otherwise mortal human, several of which were on display towards the end of this puzzling season.

Roughly one month before this season-defining stretch, the Lakers found themselves down five points with under two minutes to go against the Toronto Raptors, every game a potential make-or-break for their playoff hopes.

Kobe hit a trio of 3-pointers to eventually send the game into overtime, with the difficulty of each ranging from contested to absolutely smothered, finishing with 41 points in a two-point victory.

He spent the entire 48 minutes of a game versus the Portland Trail Blazers battling back from a double-digit deficit, going toe-to-toe with rookie Damian Lillard‘s 38 points to finish with 47 and, more importantly, a seven-point victory.

The Splash Brothers were torching the nets at Staples Center when the Golden State Warriors came to LA for the Lakers’ 80th game of the regular season.

Stephen Curry finished with 47 points and nine 3-pointers, Klay Thompson with 25 points. As the future eventually showed us, it’s very difficult to stop Golden State when those two, Curry in particular, find a rhythm.

The Lakers got the win, Kobe scored 34, but that, nor the 45 minutes he played, doesn’t do his performance justice.

He had grabbed his left knee after getting sent to the hardwood early in the third and stayed on the floor longer than most fans thought he ever would. He came up severely limping after drawing a foul almost five minutes later, fingertips bracing the court for support, but summoning the strength to remain standing.

To even the staunchest of the believers in his rightly perceived invincibility, the pain Kobe was putting himself through seemed too much for even his iron-clad will to handle at this point.

This game against the Warriors was coming on the heels of playing 274 out of a possible 288 minutes over LA’s previous six outings.

D’Antoni wanted him to sit if only for a few minutes, but Kobe always refused. Not because he didn’t want to or because his 34-year-old body wasn’t desperately telling him to, but because it would interfere with the task at hand he’d focused so intently on completing.

It’s those conflicting forces between want and need that made Kobe the global icon he is.

Even as a young 18-year-old with the world at his fingertips, he couldn’t spend any less time in the gym or the film room. How else was he supposed to win at the highest level? To clear the bar he’d set for himself and succeed Michael Jordan as the greatest basketball player ever?

He didn’t want to make the playoffs the same way you or I might want a snack throughout our day. Kobe needed a postseason spot in the vein of every sports cliche in the book.

As the story unfortunately goes, the focus on whatever mission he gave himself wound up leading to the beginning of the end of Kobe’s Hall of Fame career.

Despite those knockdowns, Kobe didn’t leave the game against Golden State, not then. He continued to push the Lakers towards a victory and the body that withstood countless nicks and ailments in the years prior finally gave out in the form of a torn left Achilles.

After returning to the court to knock down two free throws, Kobe gingerly walked off the court. He wouldn’t play again that season and the NBA wouldn’t see that Mamba again.

Kobe averaged 45.5 nightly minutes during that seven-game stretch, but the spot in the postseason seemed worthless given how much of his future it robbed us of, where everyone season after was marred by injury.

It was a win of a battle, but a loss of the war.

And yet, Kobe sent the entire NBA world an underlying message when he went down for the third and final time on that innocent April night against Golden State.

He showed us what it meant to care about something on an unfathomable and even dangerous level, the same way he did with every late-night gym session that stretched into the early morning or the bumps and bruises he shrugged off to keep playing.

He won five NBA championships and was named to 18 All-Star games. He’ll be enshrined in Springfield when the time comes later this year.

While the quantity might be different, the same accomplishments can be associated with a lot of NBA players.

What has and will always separate Kobe Bryant from the legends who came before and those who will follow was his unquantifiable desire to do whatever it took to make that distance crystal clear, even if he suffered tremendously because of it, because no physical toll could hurt more to him than his own personal failure.