20 best NBA Draft trades ever
By John Buhler
2. Kobe Bryant from Charlotte Hornets to Los Angeles Lakers.
Kobe Bryant just finished one of the greatest careers in NBA history. Bryant won five NBA Championships, made 18 trips to the All-Star Game, made 13 All-NBA teams, and 12 All-Defensive squads. Without question, Bryant is one of the 10 greatest players in NBA history.
Coming out of Lower Merion High School in Philadelphia as a teenager in the 1996 NBA Draft, Bryant went 13th overall to the Charlotte Hornets before ultimately going to the team he really wanted to play for in the Lakers.
To pull this trade off, Los Angeles agreed to send popular power forward Vlade Divac to the Hornets to acquire Bryant’s draft rights. Divac was a fine player for Charlotte, but had better stints earlier with Los Angeles and later with the Sacramento Kings. Bryant became the closest thing to Jordan coming from the shooting guard position.
The Hornets would relocate to New Orleans during the peak of the Shaq and Kobe Lakers. Though basketball would return with the expansion Charlotte Bobcats a few years later, had the Hornets just kept Bryant instead of trading him to the Lakers for Divac, basketball crazy North Carolina would have almost certainly have had an NBA Championship by now.
Next: 1. Bill Russell from St. Louis Hawks to Boston Celtics.