It took until the 8:50 mark of the second quarter for Kobe Bryant to score his first points on Saturday, as he missed his first five shots and first free throw attempt before hitting a pair of freebies against the hapless Sacramento Kings. As is usually the case with scorers, though, seeing those shots go through the net worked wonders for Bryant. A possession later Kobe (working the entire first half through a painful bone spur in his left foot) called off a Pau Gasol screen to take John Salmons off of the dribble for the score. On the touch after that, Bryant crossed Salmons over to nail the pull-up jumper at the free throw line, a perfect encapsulation of a far more efficient 2012-13 season (free throws, drives, short jumpers) that has turned Kobe Bryant into an offensive marvel even at the age of 34. Also, on the last shot he passed the legendary Wilt Chamberlain to become the NBA’s fourth all-time leading scorer. With that jumper, he scored points number 31,420 and 31,421 in a brilliant career. (It also didn’t hurt that the points came in the midst of an 11-2 run that pushed the Lakers back into the game, as the desperately try to keep pace with the Utah Jazz and Dallas Mavericks for the eighth and final playoff speed in the West. The Lakers entered the second quarter down 12 points after giving up an embarrassing 37 first quarter points to the Kings, but came back to take the lead in that second 12-minute frame.) Seven years ago, Kobe Bryant fell short by 19 points when he scored the second-most amount of points in an NBA game, tossing in 81 against the Toronto Raptors in a win. Wilt famously went for one hundred points in 1962 , dominating a tiny New York Knick front line in a dubious contest that saw his Philadelphia Warriors fouling New York down the stretch in order to get the ball back inside Wilt’s record-setting mitts. Nothing against Wilt, but Bryant’s difficulty and the iffy road that Chamberlain took toward his 100 points are why I rank Bryant’s 81 on the same level as The Big Dipper’s 100 .
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