NBA: Kobe Bryant’s best games against every team

1. Kobe v. Raptors, January 22, 2006.

81 points (28-46 FG), 6 rebounds, 3 steals, 18-20 FT

Ten years later, it’s hard to contextualize just how crazy Kobe Bryant’s 81-point game. Throughout what will be 70 years in June, a player has scored more than that total once: Wilt Chamberlain famously scored 100 points on March 2, 1962.

Oversized statistics in basketball seemed like a relic of a transitionary era, when having the size and athleticism favorable to the game today was then a rare (but possible advantage). It was rare enough that the gulf between the game’s stars and role players enabled Wilt’s 100 or for Oscar Robertson to average a triple-double throughout a season.

When Kobe Bryant dropped 81 points on the Raptors, NBA fans were used to being enthralled with half as much. The game had evolved to the point where the talent gap had shrunk between the NBA’s stars and its role players, and as a result the definition of a player quote “single-handedly taking over a game” unquote had been shrunk down. Kobe’s game didn’t elicit celebration so much as shock and awe.

Like those epic performances from fifty years ago, Kobe’s 81-point game seems trapped in film grain. It’s otherworldly, separated from the reality of basketball we live in today