Los Angeles Lakers legend Kobe Bryant’s best basketball days were far behind him by the time he was in his 20th and final season in the NBA. After all, he was in his late 30s at that point, and his body had been through a lot. As such, he averaged just 17.6 points per game while shooting a subpar 35.8 percent from the field in the 2015-16 season.
While Bryant didn’t make the same impact on the court at that point that he did earlier on in his Lakers tenure, he still had a lot of influence within the organization in his final season with the storied franchise, according to former teammate Lou Williams. Williams told an amusing story about how Bryant would miss practice, only to reject L.A.’s game plan if he didn’t like it.
“One of the funniest things that he used to do — mind you, he didn’t practice, didn’t come to practice,” Williams said. “But during preparation for games, we’ll be going over game plan. He’d just be sitting there getting dressed. He’d be like, ‘Nah, we ain’t doing that.’
“Like…we’ve been working on this s— all week. What are you talking about? We’ve been working on this s— all week, and he’s just putting his jersey on. ‘Nah, we ain’t doing that.’ And because him and B-Scott (Byron Scott) played together, B-Scott like, ‘We ain’t doing that.'”
Scott and Bryant were teammates on the Lakers all the way back in the 1996-97 campaign. That season marked Scott’s last season in the NBA and Bryant’s rookie campaign.
Williams, meanwhile, played with Bryant during the legend’s last season in the NBA. Even though Williams is best known for all of the scoring contributions he made off the bench during his NBA career, he actually received some opportunities to be in the opening lineup during his Lakers stint.
He started 36 of the 125 regular-season games he appeared in across nearly two seasons with Los Angeles. For comparison, he didn’t start more than 38 games in his stints with any of the six teams he played for at the highest level.
Williams had a productive Lakers tenure from an individual standpoint, as he averaged 16.8 points per game with the team, but L.A. didn’t experience a noteworthy amount of team success in that time. The Lakers mustered just 17 wins in Williams’ first season there, which was also Bryant’s swan song in the NBA, and they didn’t fare much better in the 2016-17 season with 26 wins.
Interestingly, Williams had plenty of highly effective basketball left in the tank following his time as a Laker, as he went on to win two Sixth Man of the Year awards while playing for the Los Angeles Clippers, giving him three for his career.
