Kobe Bryant had a lot of signature moves throughout his career. Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that many of them were simply Michael Jordan reduxes and home in on one particularly jaw-dropping move that he executed to perfection many times over and was quintessentially his own: the self-alley-oop off the backboard.
Kobe would deploy this move in situations where he found himself boxed in inside the key as a sort of diversionary tactic to free himself up for any easy rebound and put-back. It was a glorious thing to watch.
Many players have tried to replicate it, to varying degrees of success. On Friday night, sweet naive Kentavious Caldwell-Pope found himself in a position where the aforementioned move seemed to him in the moment like not only the best possible way out of a tight situation, but an opportunity to land on the top 10 plays of the week.
Instead, he will most certainly find himself on the next installment of Shaqtin-A-Fool.
https://twitter.com/HPbasketball/status/946972489380380672
Caldwell-Pope should take solace in the fact that, though it didn’t go even remotely as he imagined it would – it went sailing all the way to the opposite end of the spectrum, in fact, before finally landing somewhere on the Venice Pier – it made us and many other people extremely happy. We feel your pain, buddy, because we’ve all been there at one point or another.
