Among other things, the late Kobe Bryant was a passionate student of the game of basketball. And by student, we mean the way Mike Tyson is a student of boxing.
Tyson can talk about great fighters of the past like he has a Ph.D. in boxing and Bryant was very much that way about basketball.
And one of the players he most respected, one of the guys he really researched, was Elgin Baylor.
Like Bryant, Baylor was a Laker for his entire NBA career. He had the fortune of having Jerry West as a teammate and the misfortune of competing with Bill Russell’s Celtics from 1958 to 1969 and Russell was not letting anyone else win a title if he could possibly help it.