Official Kobe Bryant 8/24 day thread - share a story or show off a Kobe

[2010GBPackers]

Rise and shine, Blowout! Today is officially (in Orange County, anyway) Kobe Bryant day! In order to celebrate Kobe, share a story, post a card, or piece of memorabilia. I'll start it off with a piece of history I just back from PSA.

2006 - LA Lakers /Raptors Full Ticket - Kobe scores 81 points PSA 8

I’m a Kobe fan, so I will admit I have a bias not only toward his place amongst the NBA’s all-time greats but also a bias toward cards and memorabilia that I own; I’m sure I’m not alone in that regard. With that said, I consider this ticket, the FULL TICKET (not a stub) from Kobe’s 81-point game to be the most important game ticket in the modern era (post 1990). If you’re asking yourself, “Why? I get that it’s important, but gimme a break, I could think of a bunch of tickets that are more historic – even in the modern era.” If you said that to yourself, you would be wrong. And if you want a detailed explanation of why, don’t worry. Anyone who has followed my Top 10 countdown thread should know by now that being long-winded is my forte. Here we go.

I’ll begin by putting Kobe’s 81-point output in its proper place relative to other Top 10 scoring performances in NBA history. It’s number 1. That’s right, it is THE most impressive scoring stat line of all-time. I’d love to hear from those who disagree, so please, if you do, comment on my post; this is just my interpretation of the facts. Now, I’m not going break down every one of the Top 10 scoring games of all-time, but I will summarize a few of the more legendary for context. If you would like more detail, there are plenty of websites you can visit that will go more in-depth.



Let’s start by addressing what happened in almost every game but did not occur in Kobe’s 81-point game – intentional fouling in order to pad the player’s stat line. Go do the research – Wilt’s 100-point game, Wilt’s 78-point game, David Thompson’s 73-point game, David Robinson’s 71-point game, Booker’s 70-point game. They all were complete jokes. Go read what happened in the fourth quarter of those games. Go read the context. David Thompson’s 73-point game and David Robinson’s 71-point game came in the last game of the season, with Robinson fraudulently stealing the scoring title over Shaq. Wilt’s 78 was in an overtime game where there were 73 fouls and 188 rebounds. In Wilt’s 100-point game he shot 63 times. For Kobe’s 81-point game, 46 times. No one has shot over 50 shots in a game in the last 30 years and Wilt put up 63 shots! Even Wilt has admitted that his teammates just gave him the ball in an attempt at 100. That’s not an athletic competition, that’s using it as a vessel for a Guinness Book of World Records accomplishment. If that weren’t enough, the Warriors spend the entire 4th quarter fouling Knicks players just so they could get Wilt the ball again, with the Knicks retaliating and trying to run out the clock. With no footage of the game, I think it’s also a bit suspect that he went 28 for 32 from the line when he was a career 50% free-throw shooter. I’d love FiveThirtyEight.com to run the calculations on that to determine if that is even statistically possible or if there was ever a stretch anywhere else in his career where he went 28 for 32. I’m betting I know the answer.

That brings us to Kobe’s 81-point game. Yes, the Raptors were a terrible team, but let’s not forget, it took place in the modern era of basketball where the talent pool is conservatively 1,000 times better than what it was up into the 1990’s. Basketball, until relatively recently, did not draw from a large talent pool. It was, maybe, the 4th most popular sport in the US. And globally? Ha! There are 2 sports today that draw from such a large pool of talent that there is no doubt the players you see playing are most likely the best in the world – soccer and basketball. I believe that adds value to the historical significance of Kobe’s night. Say what you will about the Raptors team, those were professional basketball players in the most competitive league in the world.

Not only was the competition Kobe had to face better than any on the list above, he also did it in a real, competitive game. Now they were all “real games,” but as I mentioned before, those games turned into complete jokes, competitively speaking. Kobe actually brought the Lakers back from an 18-point, 3rd quarter deficit to win the game. No fouling the other team to get him more shots, no fouling to get him to the FT line, no real run-up of his point total. His 81-points came in the flow of the game. There’s only one other candidate (Elgin Baylor’s 71) that in my research appeared to have no bizarre circumstances resulting in his box score. Another angle that pro-Wilt fans tend to gravitate towards is the, “But, Wilt didn’t have the luxury of the 3-point back then.” First of all, the 3-point shot is much more difficult and less efficient than Wilt repeatedly dunking over some unathletic 6’6” power forward. Not to mention, as I did earlier, Wilt consistently took all of the Warriors shots most games. And in his 100-point game he shot 17 more times from the field and 12 more times from the FT line than Kobe did in his 81-point masterpiece. Even without the 3-point line, Kobe would have had 73 points – still a modern-era record. If you extrapolate Kobe’s efficiency that night and match that to Wilt’s FG’s and FT’s from his 100-point night, Kobe would have ended up with 105-points, without taking into account the 3-point shot.

I’ll now move on to the full-ticket from this game and why I believe high-grade examples are the most important in the modern-era. We all have saved a ticket from a game for one reason or another: a Super Bowl, son’s first game, Kerry Wood’s 20K performance. We’ve all done it. But, what makes this game ticket so unique is the circumstances that made it quite an ordinary ticket to begin. Most tickets that are valuable were valuable to begin – Super Bowl, World Series, NBA Finals tickets. And because of this, people are much more careful when saving them. High-grade examples of Super Bowl and World Series tickets are fairly easy to come by because people are already anticipating their value after the game for either themselves or to fans of the winning team, so they keep them pristine. Kobe’s 81-point game came during a “dog-days of summer (winter)” game in the NBA. Nothing special about it. Just two, below-average teams playing at the end of February, so no one was carefully handling the ticket before the game.
Another oddity that makes high-grade examples so rare is that the game was played in the latter stages of tickets actually being ripped instead of being scanned. So, what are “full-tickets” today would never have been in 2006. Any full-ticket from this game was the result of someone not attending the game. And the game was a sell-out. The final piece of 81-point full-ticket is how season tickets are often handled. They’re pinned to a corkboard at home or paper-clipped together in an envelope. All things that prevent it from being better than a PSA 4 or 5. Not only do high-grade examples have to be unused, but they also have had to avoid so many pitfalls of how regular season game tickets are traditional handled. I will say, if a Michael Jordan debut full-ticket ever appears, that would be the holy grail of tickets. To date, only 13 Jordan debut stubs have been graded by PSA, with 0 full-tickets.

This is actually the second Kobe 81-point game ticket (PSA 8) that I have owned. I ended up selling the first one to a guy at the 2017 National, who came up to my booth, pointed at it and said, “I’ll take it.” No questions, no haggling, nothing. I regretted it right away. The PSA 10 copy (pop 1) of this ticket was floating around for a while and Goldin ended up selling it for $5,000 back in May. That would be cool to have, I just didn’t want to spend that kind of money to get a replacement. The day of Kobe’s death, I was at a restaurant in downtown Milwaukee with my brother and sister, who was visiting from Columbus, OH. I see my sister looking above me (I had my back to the bar’s TV’s) with a shocked look on her face. I turn around and there it is, the news story and live footage of Kobe’s helicopter crash. We were all in shock the rest of the day. As I’m sitting there, I remember I had a Kobe 81-point full ticket in my “watched” items on eBay. I rarely find one good enough to think about buying because of how many have pinholes and/or paperclip marks, but this one looked really nice. I offered the guy $600 or so months before but he turned me down. I knew that if I waited either someone else would snatch it up or he would raise his price so I hit the BIN. I submitted it to PSA soon after but because of COVID and their never-ending backlog, I just received it a week ago. I wish they had a better case for it but it’s a tad too long for their standard ticket case. To date, PSA has graded 27 full tickets with my PSA 8 being a pop 5 with only the PSA 10 copy grading higher. Happy 8/24 day!