Whatever else the 2015-16 Los Angeles Lakers might’ve been went out the window the second Kobe Bryant published that poem.
Granted, it’s not like a couple of pups, Roy Hibbert and The Nick Young-Lou Williams Experience was going to return the Lake Show to the playoffs. (There’s a reason we tapped them to finish with one of the West’s worst records last year.) But as soon as the Mamba made it clear that two decades of grinding and the season–ending injuries that scuttled his mid-30s had caused his monomaniacal desire to wane, and as soon as coach Byron Scott made it clear that there was no plane of existence in which he would punish Kobe’s basketballular transgressions, we knew what was coming.