Why do you think I’m the best player in the world? Because I never ever get bored with the basics.
– Kobe Bryant
Every year when August 24th comes around, I find myself back here in one way or another. If you have been around this blog for any length of time, you already know what Kobe Bryant means to me and how much of my love for the Lakers can be traced directly back to watching him play. I have written about the championships, the 81-point game, the final game, losing him and Gianna, and everything his career came to represent for me beyond basketball. At this point, trying to tell that entire story again would probably just mean repeating things I have already said.
There is something about these two days sitting side by side on the calendar that makes this time of year feel a little different, too. August 23rd would have been Kobe’s 48th birthday this year, followed immediately by August 24th (8/24), the two numbers that came to define his 20 years with the Lakers. One day remembers the person and the life that began in 1978. The next has become this annual reminder of everything 8 and 24 came to represent. For me, they’ve become pretty difficult to separate.
So this year I wanted to go somewhere a little different.
Instead of purple and gold, I went back to where Kobe’s story really began to take shape. I styled this year’s Mamba Day photo around the maroon and white of Lower Merion High School, pairing it with Flite’s Krazy 8s, because if you’re doing a Kobe photo and someone gives you a shoe inspired by one of his most recognizable early sneakers, the decision pretty much makes itself. I still couldn’t completely leave the purple behind, though. It’s there on the wall beside the court, almost waiting on the other side of the story.
Before there was a number 8 hanging in the rafters in Los Angeles, before 24, before five championships and everything that came afterward, there was number 33 at Lower Merion.
Kobe’s path there was already a little different. He was six when his family moved to Italy, where his father, Joe Bryant, continued his professional basketball career, and thirteen when they returned to the United States. Those seven years weren’t simply somewhere else he happened to live. Basketball was already part of the Bryant household, and Kobe grew up around the professional game while learning through a European system that placed enormous emphasis on fundamentals, footwork, spacing, ball-handling, and technique. Those fundamentals that would eventually become such recognizable parts of his game were being drilled into him long before most people in America had any idea who he was.
Italy was also more than some childhood stop he vaguely remembered. Kobe learned Italian, spent most of the childhood he could remember overseas, and returned to the Philadelphia area, where he had to adjust to American life again. So when we talk about the freshman who showed up at Lower Merion, we’re already talking about a kid whose relationship with basketball and the world around him had been shaped differently than most of the players he was about to face.
I think that gets even more interesting when you know what came later. We remember the athleticism, the impossible shots, and the things he could do with a basketball that most people couldn’t. Underneath it all was someone obsessed with the smallest pieces of the game. Before the Mamba Mentality became a phrase people put on shirts and motivational graphics, there was a kid learning how his feet were supposed to move.
Then came Lower Merion.
What I love about this part of Kobe’s story is that he didn’t walk into some untouchable basketball powerhouse and simply become the latest great player to come through it. He became the first freshman in decades to start for Lower Merion’s varsity team, and his first season ended 4-20.
That could easily disappear into the mythology when we talk about Kobe now. We know what he became, so there is a tendency to make all of it sound inevitable. The championships were coming. The scoring records were coming. Of course this kid was going to become Kobe Bryant.
Except none of that had happened yet.
At Lower Merion, there was simply an incredibly talented teenager playing for a team that lost twenty games during his freshman year. He wasn’t walking into something already built for him. He was there while they built it.
The next season, Lower Merion went 20-6. As a junior, Kobe helped lead the Aces to a 26-5 record, their first Central League championship in nearly 20 years, and a trip to the state tournament. By then, he wasn’t simply a really talented kid anymore. He was becoming one of the best high school basketball players in the country, and Lower Merion was becoming something very different from the team he had joined two years earlier.
His senior year was the culmination of everything they had been building.
Lower Merion went 31-3, won 27 consecutive games, and captured the Pennsylvania Class AAAA state championship, the school’s first state basketball title since 1943. Kobe averaged more than 30 points per game during those final two seasons and finished his high school career with 2,883 points, breaking the Southeastern Pennsylvania scoring record that had belonged to Wilt Chamberlain.
Think about that progression for a second.
4-20.
Then 20-6.
Then 26-5.
Then 31-3 and state champions.
Four years after joining a team that won four games, Kobe walked out of Lower Merion having helped deliver something the school hadn’t experienced in more than fifty years.
That’s the part I keep coming back to.
We tend to tell stories about great athletes backward. Once we know someone became one of the greatest basketball players ever, every earlier moment starts to look like evidence that it was always going to happen. Lower Merion makes that harder to do. The freshman season is sitting right there. So are all the steps between four wins and a state championship.
That feels like the Mamba Mentality before anybody had a name for it.
By the time he finished, Kobe had become the National High School Player of the Year, a McDonald’s All-American and one of the most talked-about young basketball players in the country. College programs wanted him, but Kobe chose another path. At seventeen, he stood inside the Lower Merion gym and announced that he was going straight to the NBA.
I, Kobe Bryant, have decided to skip college and take my talent to the NBA. I knew that I was not going to be stopped. So at the age of eighteen, this was my life. Right?
So, you can’t possibly become better than me because you’re not spending the time on it that I do.
Even if you wanna spend the time on it, you can’t because you have other things. You have other responsibilities that are taking you away from it.
So, I already won.
-Kobe Bryant
Even the way he became a Laker has a funny little wrinkle to it.
Kobe was officially selected thirteenth overall by the Charlotte Hornets in the 1996 NBA Draft. The Lakers had already arranged to acquire his draft rights in exchange for Vlade Divac, so one of the greatest Lakers of all time technically began his NBA story belonging to somebody else.
Then he came to Los Angeles.
We know what happened from there.
Five championships. Eighteen All-Star selections. An MVP. Two Finals MVPs. 81 points in a single game. 60 in the last one. Twenty seasons wearing one uniform and eventually both 8 and 24 hanging above the court.
There are entire posts in every one of those accomplishments, and over the years I’ve written quite a few of them. That’s part of why I don’t feel the need to run through Kobe’s entire Lakers career every August 24th anymore. I’ve already done that. More importantly, I lived through it as a fan.
What has become more interesting to me as the years pass is everything surrounding those accomplishments.
Lower Merion didn’t simply become the place Kobe Bryant went to school. By the time he left, the expectations around that basketball program were nothing like the ones he walked into as a freshman, and his number 33 eventually joined 8 and 24 as another Kobe Bryant jersey that nobody else would wear again.
And all these years later, that 4-20 freshman season is still there at the beginning of the story.
I’ve spent a lot of time writing about Kobe on this blog.
When Kobe retired in 2016, I wrote about watching his career from beginning to end and all of those basketball memories that somehow became markers in my own life. When he died in 2020, writing became one of the ways I tried to process something I genuinely couldn’t wrap my head around. 24:8 and But Legends Are Forever were difficult posts to make, but they gave me somewhere to put some of what I was feeling.
Those posts hit differently now than they did when I wrote them. Some were celebrations. Some were grief. Others were me trying to figure out why someone I had never actually known could have occupied such a permanent place in my life.
By Mamba Day in 2022, I was thinking about him differently again. I wrote about the way Kobe approached details, about constantly trying to improve what you do, and about carrying pieces of that mentality into my own photography and writing. I also wrote about something much bigger than basketball: how much I admired the person he seemed to be becoming after retirement, especially the father who used his platform to advocate for girls in sports.
The following year, I approached Mamba Day from a completely different angle. My 2023 post was built around Kobe’s shoes and the history that followed him from Adidas into the Nike years, through retirement and eventually into the return of the Kobe brand. Even then, Lower Merion found its way into the story through the Zoom Kobe IV “Lower Merion” and its maroon-and-white color scheme. I didn’t know I’d come back three years later wearing those colors myself with a pair of Krazy 8s on my feet, but apparently some ideas just take the long way around.
I didn’t write a Mamba Day post in 2024 or 2025. I wasn’t blogging or posting nearly as much during those years, and when August came around, I didn’t really have an idea that felt worth forcing just because of the date. I still remembered. I still thought about Kobe and what these two days in August mean to me. I just didn’t have anything new I needed to say.
I actually think I’m okay with that. These posts have always meant more to me when there is a reason behind them beyond simply keeping an annual tradition alive. This year, somewhere between number 33, Lower Merion, and thinking about where the Lakers are headed with Luka, I found that reason again.
That’s probably why Mamba Day has continued to matter to me.
The posts are little time capsules now. They were written by different versions of me trying to make sense of Kobe’s legacy at different moments. My relationship with what he left behind has changed because enough time has passed that it almost has to.
One thing hasn’t.
Kobe is why I became a Lakers fan.
“As a kid, I would work tirelessly on adding elements to my game. I would see something I liked in person or on film, go practice it immediately, practice it more the next day, and then go out and use it. By the time I reached the league, I had a short learning curve. I could see something, download it, and have it down pat.”
-Kobe Bryant, The Mamba Mentality: How I Play
Which brings us to Luka Dončić.
There are some parallels between Luka and Kobe that I hadn’t really thought about until I started putting this post together. I don’t want to stretch them into some argument that the two have identical stories because they very obviously don’t. Once you start looking at where each of them came from, though, there are some interesting connections.
One of my favorites is the age thirteen sitting right in the middle of both stories. Kobe’s European chapter ended at thirteen when he returned to America. Luka’s really began at thirteen when he left Slovenia for Spain.
Kobe spent part of his childhood learning the game in Italy before coming back to America and becoming a high school phenomenon. Luka went in the opposite direction. He grew up in Slovenia and moved to Spain after signing with Real Madrid, leaving his family behind and joining one of Europe’s biggest basketball organizations at an age when most of us were worried about far less important things.
By sixteen, Luka was playing professionally for Real Madrid.
That’s one of those facts that can get lost now because we’ve had so many years of Luka making ridiculous things look normal. Sixteen is absurdly young to be playing professional basketball against grown men, particularly for a club with Real Madrid’s expectations.
And he didn’t simply survive there.
Luka became one of the best basketball players in Europe before he ever stepped onto an NBA court. He helped Slovenia win EuroBasket in 2017, and in 2018 he led Real Madrid to the EuroLeague championship, becoming the youngest EuroLeague MVP and the youngest Final Four MVP in history.
By the time NBA fans were being introduced to Luka Dončić, he had already spent years learning how to play against professionals. He wasn’t arriving from Europe as an interesting project somebody hoped might eventually develop. He had already won.
Then, just like Kobe, draft night got a little weird.
Luka was selected third overall in 2018 by the Atlanta Hawks and immediately had his draft rights traded to the Dallas Mavericks for Trae Young and a future first-round pick. Neither Kobe nor Luka ever played for the NBA team that originally drafted him.
Dallas quickly learned what they had.
Luka won Rookie of the Year and almost immediately began turning ridiculous stat lines into something that felt routine. He became an All-Star, an All-NBA First Team player, and the unquestioned center of everything Dallas was building. There were triple-doubles, playoff performances that didn’t seem possible, game winners, and nights where you looked at the box score afterward and wondered how somebody had done all of that in one basketball game.
There is also one Kobe and Luka moment from those Dallas years that feels considerably more interesting now than it did at the time. In December 2019, Kobe was sitting courtside with Gianna during a Lakers game against Dallas when Luka heard somebody talking to him from the sideline. The funny part wasn’t simply that it was Kobe. Kobe was talking trash to him in Slovenian.
Luka turned around, realized who it was, and the two shared a moment after the game. At the time, it was just Kobe being Kobe and finding a particularly creative way to mess with one of the league’s young stars. Gianna was there because she was a Luka fan, which makes the whole thing hit differently now too. That game would end up being the last NBA game Kobe and Gianna attended together.
Looking at it now, knowing everything that happened afterward, there is something pretty incredible about that little moment. The kid who spent part of his childhood in Italy was sitting beside his daughter in Los Angeles, speaking Slovenian to the kid who grew up there, years before that kid could have known Los Angeles would eventually become his home too.
Nobody sitting in that building that night could have known where any of this was going.
Back in Dallas, Luka also kept running into the part of basketball where individual brilliance only gets you so far.
There were playoff exits. There were questions about whether Dallas had enough around him. There were years where it felt like Luka could do almost anything, and the Mavericks still couldn’t quite get over the top.
Then came 2024.
Luka took Dallas all the way to the NBA Finals. After years of absurd individual performances, he finally had the deep postseason run that seemed like it would become the foundation for the next decade of Mavericks basketball. He was still only twenty-five. Dallas had its superstar. Luka had his team.
At least that’s what everybody thought.
A few months later, basketball reminded everyone how little is actually guaranteed.
In February 2025, Dallas traded Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers in a deal centered around Anthony Davis.
I still don’t know if I have completely processed that sentence.
I’ve watched basketball long enough to know that almost anyone can be traded, but this wasn’t a veteran at the end of his career or a star asking to get out. One of the best basketball players in the world, still in his twenties and less than a year removed from taking Dallas to the NBA Finals, was suddenly a Laker.
There is another strange little parallel there.
Kobe didn’t choose Los Angeles on draft night either. Charlotte selected him and traded his rights to the Lakers. Almost thirty years later, Luka didn’t choose Los Angeles when Dallas decided to trade him. Different circumstances, different points in their careers, and very different trades, but both eventually had someone else make a decision that put them in purple and gold.
The difference is in what Los Angeles received.
Kobe arrived as a seventeen-year-old prospect nobody could possibly know everything about yet. Luka arrived as an established superstar who had already won at the highest level in Europe and taken an NBA team to the Finals.
He wasn’t coming to Los Angeles to figure out whether he could become a superstar.
He already was one.
That courtside moment clearly meant something to Luka too. When he was introduced as a Laker years later, he brought it up himself. He remembered Kobe speaking Slovenian to him and how much it meant that Kobe even knew who he was. Standing there as the newest Laker, Luka said he wished Kobe and Gigi could have been there to see where his career had taken him.
That part gets me a little more than all the parallels. The moment mattered enough to Luka that, while still trying to process one of the most shocking trades in NBA history, Kobe and Gigi were part of what was on his mind when he arrived in Los Angeles.
Now the Lakers belong to Luka.
That sentence carries a little more weight this year because the transition isn’t theoretical anymore. The LeBron James era in Los Angeles has ended, and Luka isn’t simply the superstar who arrived with the expectation that he would eventually take over. He is the centerpiece.
That also means everything changes.
Being great somewhere else and being the face of the Los Angeles Lakers are not quite the same job. Fair or unfair, this franchise measures its greatest players in banners. Luka has already proven that he can put up numbers that barely look real and carry a team deep into the playoffs. The question now is what he builds in Los Angeles.
Because apparently this story needed one more strange little connection, Luka gave us one this year.
In March, he scored 60 points in a Lakers uniform against Miami, becoming the first Laker to reach 60 since Kobe scored 60 in the final game of his career ten years earlier. Even the way he got there was weirdly familiar. Luka went to the free-throw line needing one point to reach 60 with 14.8 seconds left. Kobe had reached 60 in his final game from the free-throw line with exactly 14.8 seconds left too.
It doesn’t mean anything. Basketball occasionally just gives you these wonderfully ridiculous coincidences. But when you’re writing a Mamba Day post about the strange ways Kobe and Luka’s stories keep brushing against each other, I’m certainly not going to ignore that one.
That’s where I think the connection to Kobe becomes more interesting than simply pointing out similarities between their careers.
There is no replacing Kobe Bryant, and I don’t particularly want anyone to try. Luka doesn’t need to become Kobe any more than Kobe needed to become Michael Jordan. He doesn’t need Kobe’s footwork, Kobe’s shot selection, Kobe’s personality, or somebody constantly measuring every game he plays against a person who isn’t here anymore.
What I hope carries forward is the expectation.
Not Kobe’s game.
The standard behind it.
That’s what the Mamba Mentality has always meant more to me anyway. It isn’t a fadeaway jumper. It isn’t screaming at yourself in a gym at four in the morning because somebody made a motivational video about Kobe Bryant.
It’s being willing to keep working on the boring parts.
That’s why the quote at the beginning of this post sticks with me so much.
Never getting bored with the basics.
Kobe’s story at Lower Merion makes considerably more sense through that lens. Four wins became twenty. Twenty became twenty-six. Twenty-six became thirty-one and a state championship. The player who eventually became famous for impossible shots spent years obsessing over footwork.
Luka’s challenge is different now, but the principle isn’t.
He has already been the teenage prodigy. He has already conquered European basketball. He has already been Rookie of the Year, an All-Star, an All-NBA player, and an NBA finalist. He has already proven he belongs among the best basketball players in the world.
Now he gets to decide what comes next.
Different countries. Different generations. Completely different basketball players.
There is Italy in Kobe’s story and Slovenia and Spain in Luka’s. There are two teenagers learning basketball through European systems before taking very different roads to the NBA. There are two draft nights where another team’s name appeared beside them before a trade changed everything.
Eventually, somehow, both roads led to Los Angeles.
I’ll be watching Luka and these Lakers the same way I’ve watched this team for most of my life, wanting another championship and probably getting far too emotionally invested in basketball games along the way. Some things aren’t going to change.
Neither is what August 24th means to me.
It’s a day to remember Kobe and Gianna. It’s a day to remember the player who made me fall in love with the Lakers and all of the memories attached to twenty years of watching him wear that uniform. Every year I seem to find something slightly different to hold onto when I come back here.
This year, it was number 33.
Going all the way back to the maroon and white of Lower Merion reminded me that the finished product was never really the most interesting part of Kobe’s story.
It was everything it took to get there.
From Italy to Lower Merion. From 4-20 to state champions. From number 33 in maroon and white to 8 and 24 in purple and gold.
And now another kid whose basketball story began on the other side of the Atlantic gets his chance to figure out what he can build in Los Angeles.
I don’t know where Luka’s Lakers story ends. That’s part of the fun of getting to watch it happen.
I already know where Kobe’s ended.
The numbers will always belong to him.
The work, the standard, and the mentality don’t have to.
Mamba Forever. 💜💛
“I was lucky to grow up in Italy at a time when basketball in America was getting f***** up with AAU shuffling players through on strength and athleticism.
I missed all that, and instead I was taught extreme fundamentals: footwork, footwork, footwork, how to create space, how to handle the ball, how to protect the ball, how to shoot the ball.
I wasn’t the strongest kid at that camp. I wasn’t the fastest. I wasn’t the most athletic. I was probably the most skillful, but that didn’t matter. It was all about the 360 windmill dunks.”
-Kobe Bryant, Business Insider
Credits:
Head: LeLUTKA.Head.NOA.4.0 ~ Jaden Nova
Head Applier: Stray Dog HERVE EVOX TAN (V) NO BROWS ~ Gac Akina
Hair: [MFCNT] THOR Bun – Grooming Hair ~ LeBarbier Alpha
Hairbase: LeLUTKA.EvoX.Hairbase.044 (BOM) ~ Jaden Nova (Comes with the LeLUTKA NOA Head)
Eyes: [ContraptioN] Depthglass Eye ~ Walton Wainwright
Eyebase: Avi-Glam. Prism Eyes – Pack 2 ~ Eye Daddy
Ears: ^^Swallow^^ Gauged S Ears ~ Luciayes Magic
Ear Tattoo: RichB. Ears Tattoo #08 ~ Salvy Hexem
Beard: [MFCNT] Ducky Skunk Beard & Stache ~ LeBarbier Alpha
Beard Layer: PHYSIQUE X – Logan Facial Hair (v1) Tintable ~ PhysiqueX Resident
Body: [LEGACY] Athletic Edition (1.7.1) ~ MeshBody Resident
Skin: VELOUR: PICASSO HOMME Skin for Legacy (FIT/TAN) Picasso Neck ~ Kiria Mama
Nails: Pare.Cure Mesh Nails Both Hands [Short] – Legacy ~ Flazedo Resident
Torso Tattoo: Boscato Vigor Upper Body Tattoo MEDIUM ~ Boston Blaisdale
Shine: +ARANA+ Basic Body Shine – 3D Materials Ultra HQ (2K)+++ ~ Yana Nightwish
Shorts: [VALE KOER] BALLER SHORTS GIANNI ~ Bob Resident
Shoes: Flite.– Krazy 8s ~ FliteCo Resident
Earrings: = DAE = SXD1 ~ Naomi Darkheart
~Scene~
Backdrop: MM5 Urban Basketball Half Court ~ Marco Rejkus
Pose: HARI POSES – Bento Pose 640 FATPACK MALE ~ Haribosss Resident
Hoop: [Bad Unicorn] Hoop Shooter ~ Badunicorn Resident
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