Former NBA superstar Kobe Bryant, daughter among 9 dead in helicopter crash
Kobe Bryant, a generational star who jumped from high school to the NBA and led the Los Angeles Lakers to five championships, reportedly has died in a helicopter crash that killed nine people Sunday.
Bryant was 41.
TMZ first reported Bryant’s death in the crash. The Lakers confirmed it.
ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reports that one of Kobe and Vanessa Bryant’s four children, 13-year-old Gianna Maria-Onore Bryant, was on the helicopter with him as they headed for a basketball tournament, another teammate and parent were on the helicopter.
The Los Angeles Times reported that an Orange Coast College assistant baseball coach said Orange Coast’s head baseball coach John Altobelli was on board, along with his wife, Keri, and daughter, Alyssa, who played on the same basketball team as Bryant’s daughter.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva wouldn’t name those who died, instead saying the office would wait for coroner to make the official identifications and next of kin to be notified as is standard. On Sunday, the National Transportation Safety Board announced it sent an 18-person “go team” to investigate the crash.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office said the helicopter, which the NTSB identified as a Sikorsky S-76B, went down near 4200 Virgenes Rd. in Calabasas, California.
Bryant averaged 25.0 points, 5.2 rebounds and 4.7 assists per game in his career. And if his jumper wasn’t going down that night, well, he’d keep shooting. But he could still get his points off penetration, either at the hoop or the free throw line (83.7 percent free throw shooter).
On Jan. 22, 2006, Bryant torched the Toronto Raptors, the nets at each end of the court and nearly everything else in Staples Center with an 81-point performance on 28 of 46 shooting (60.9 percent) from the field, including seven of 13 from three-point range and 18 of 20 from the line. Only center Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game in 1962 surpasses it in NBA history for single-game, single-person scoring.
A statement from Miami Heat President Pat Riley said, “Kobe Bryant was a Godsend to this world; not just to the NBA, but to all those who hold dear and cherish family, friends and faith. Today, I mourn the tremendous loss of Kobe, his daughter, Gianna and the other passengers. The Lord will bless Vanessa, the entire Bryant family and all of those who lost their most precious loved ones today.”
Sunday, Toronto and San Antonio each took 24-second violations at the start of the game in homage to Bryant, who wore Nos. 8 and 24 during his career.
In what appears to be Bryant’s last Tweet, he congratulated LeBron James after James moved past him on the NBA’s all-time scoring list Saturday night while wearing the uniform of the Lakers, the only team in Bryant’s 20-season NBA career (1996-2016).
Lakers teams starring by Bryant and, in the early 2000s, center Shaquille O’Neal, won five NBA championships and reached seven NBA Finals in the years between Michael Jordan retiring from the Chicago Bulls in 1998 and James going to the Miami Heat in 2010.
As with James since his 2010 decision to leave Cleveland for the Miami Heat, feelings on Bryant throughout his career tended to cluster around the baskets of Love and Hate and be based more on how they felt about the small forward/shooting guard rather than how they felt about the Lakers.
Bryant understood that. In a 2006 commercial for Nike that he co-wrote, his voice over said, “Love me or hate me. One or the other. That’s the way it always has been. Hate my game, my swagger. Hate my fadeaway, my hunger. Hate that I’m a veteran. A champion. Hate that. Hate it with all your heart.
“And hate that I’m loved for the same reasons.”
Heat star Dwyane Wade, then in his third season in a career with few clouds, said at the time, “That really hit home right there.”
Bryant grew up watching his father, former NBA player Joe “Jellybean” Bryant, play in Italy. By the time Kobe Bryant declared for the 1996 NBA Draft straight out of Philadelphia’s Lower Merion High School, he was fluent in Italian and conversational in veteran NBA tricks of the trade.
(He also was a big soccer fan. Several stars returned that love after his death was announced Sunday.)
Charlotte took Bryant with the No. 13 overall pick, but in one of the moves that made Lakers Hall of Fame player Jerry West a Hall of Famer as a general manager also, West traded center Vlade Divac to Charlotte for the 18-year-old.
West’s other brilliant moves regarding Bryant: bringing in Phil Jackson as coach in 1999 and, with Jackson, refereeing the working relationship between Bryant and center O’Neal.
West signed O’Neal as a free agent in 1996 after drafting Bryant. Two competitive men each used to being the center of their team’s universes clashed once Bryant’s stature as a player and presence on the Lakers came close to O’Neal’s. They fussed and fought both behind closed doors and with reporters present.
While O’Neal was older, he put forth a sunny, big kid image with the movie roles and commercials he chose. Bryant, “Black Mamba,” got out of bed deadly serious about all things basketball.
O’Neal made fun of his poor free throw shooting and just lived with it rather than, say, use an uncool granny-style. Bryant once spent a half hour after a loss to the Heat at American Airlines Arena running himself through shooting drills.
Their feud waxed and waned through three NBA titles and, really, the rest of their careers into retirement. It reached a nadir in 2003.
After San Antonio halted the Lakers’ run of titles in 2003, the Lakers had loaded up with fading-but-still-pretty-good Gary Payton and Karl Malone during the 2003 offseason. In July, a Colorado hotel employee accused Bryant of raping her the night before he underwent surgery.
Bryant admitted there was a sexual encounter, apologized to his wife and bought her a ring reported to be worth $4 million, but denied the rape accusation. The criminal case was dropped after the woman refused to testify in a trial that would’ve been blown out over the increasingly wired media. Bryant’s statement said, in part, “Although I truly believe this encounter between us was consensual, I recognize now that she did not and does not view this incident the same way I did.”
A civil suit was settled for an undisclosed amount.
In the investigation, the Los Angeles Times and several outlets reported that the police report said Bryant claimed O’Neal paid women upwards of $1 million to keep quiet about “situations like this.”
After the Lakers lost in the NBA Finals to Detroit that season, O’Neal got traded to the Miami Heat. Red t-shirts reading “THANKS, KOBE” came out the following spring.
Bryant would win two more NBA titles, in 2009 and 2010, winning Finals MVP both times, with a different collection of Lakers than the one with which he began the decade.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated as more is learned.
This story was originally published January 26, 2020 at 2:51 PM.
