Lakers Owner Jeanie Buss Says Kobe Bryant Is Player She’d Trust With Her ‘Life’ To Make Free Throw

Harrison Faigen
3 Min Read
Robert Hanashiro-USA TODAY Sports

Former Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant is expected to eventually be inducted into the NBA Hall of Fame in large part due to his heroics in the clutch, with a career full of game-winners and icy-veined late shots as he led the team to five championships in his 20-year career.

All of those shots held varying degrees of importance for the Lakers and Bryant, with some helping the team win regular-season games that were relatively meaningless in the grand scheme of things, to postseason buzzer-beaters that showed how sure-handed Bryant was under true pressure.

Important as the heroics may seem, none of them came with someone’s life on the line. But given Bryant’s reliability in late-game situations, Lakers owner Jeanie Buss tweeted that if her life were ever hanging in the balance of a clutch free throw, Bryant is the man she’d call:

There would be far worse choices for Buss than Bryant, a career 83.7 percent free-throw shooter who always seemed to be automatic at the line late in games.

Presumably ranking around last on Buss’ theoretical list of players to make a free throw as her life hangs in the balance is probably Bryant’s partner for three of his titles, Shaquille O’Neal, a career 52.7 percent free-throw shooter, but not far above him would likely be the Lakers’ current team.

The 2017-18 Lakers rank last in the league in free-throw percentage (68.5 percent) and have started turning towards unorthodox methods like meditation to fix the issue.

They could probably learn a thing or two from Bryant’s poise under pressure, but until then, if aliens land and force Buss to choose one player to hit a free-throw to save her life, she’s probably better off sticking with Bryant.

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Harrison Faigen is co-host of the Locked on Lakers podcast (subscribe here), and you can follow him on Twitter at @hmfaigen, or support his work via Venmo here or Patreon here.
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