Playing against Kobe Bryant for 17 years convinced Jason Terry of one thing: He needed to prepare zealously before coaching against him for the first time.
So two weeks ahead of a January trip from Dallas to Southern California, Terry obtained video of Bryant’s Mamba Sports Academy girls’ basketball team for film study. Then he watched Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, and the rest of Team Mamba in person the day before the showdown.
“All I’m thinking is, ‘We’ve got to be really ready for this game,’” Terry said. “So I’m scouting them hard, taking my notes. Because if it’s going to be anything like the way he competed, he’s going to try to tear my heart out.”
The scouting mission was last Saturday, Jan. 25. The next morning, Terry’s Lady Drive Nation squad was in a van on its way to the Mamba Sports Academy in Thousand Oaks, Calif., for a noon tipoff. Word soon began to circulate that a helicopter transporting Bryant to the area had crashed into a Calabasas hillside.
Tournament play in the first-ever Mamba Cup came to a sudden halt, even before it was confirmed that the crash had killed all nine people aboard: Kobe and Gianna Bryant, two of Gianna’s teammates, three other parents, one assistant coach and the pilot.
“Being right where he was coming to, and knowing what he was coming for, is what I’m struggling with,” Terry said.
Terry, who played in the N.B.A. from the 1999-2000 season through 2017-18, is hardly alone. The basketball world is grieving like never before in the wake of a crash that claimed the life of the retired Kobe Bryant at 41, robbed Gianna Bryant of her promising future and shattered at least five families.
And then there’s the N.B.A. family.
February is always a marquee month in the N.B.A. The annual trade deadline falls on Thursday this season. All-Star Weekend, the league’s midseason party, commences a week later in Chicago. Yet neither occasion is generating anything close to its usual hoopla or anticipation amid the deep sorrow that has gripped those who play and work in the N.B.A. — with no way to forecast how long the pain will be felt so acutely.
“It’s sad every day,” Clippers forward Kawhi Leonard said.
As recently as August, Leonard and his new Clippers teammate Paul George were at the Mamba Sports Academy for their own sessions with the self-styled “Black Mamba,” seemingly as eager to learn from Bryant as Gianna and her teammates, including Alyssa Altobelli and Payton Chester, who also died in the crash.
“We grew up here,” George told reporters in Los Angeles. “He was our hero. He was our G.O.A.T.”
On Friday night at Staples, before the Lakers’ first game since the tragedy, LeBron James made a powerful four-minute speech in Bryant’s honor and then led his former team against the visiting Portland Trail Blazers — after the Lakers convinced the league office that Tuesday’s game against the Clippers had to be postponed.
It was too much, Lakers officials insisted, to ask players and club employees to stage a nationally televised game just two days after Bryant’s death.
Friday was still too soon for Portland’s grief-stricken Carmelo Anthony, who asked to skip the game at Staples. He had been scheduled to have dinner with Bryant in Los Angeles on Thursday night.
Terry understood completely. Upon returning home to Dallas, he found it difficult just to coach two games this week, for his high school girls’ team at North Dallas Adventist Academy.
“I was shaking going back into a gym,” Terry said. “My hands were literally shaking. I don’t know how the Lakers are going to do it.”
N.B.A. teams have confronted sudden death before. But they have done so sporadically, rarely during the season, and never on this scale — with a legend, children and family members involved.
The Boston Celtics lost their prized draft pick Len Bias to a drug overdose in 1986, before Bias ever played a game for them, then were rocked again in July 1993, when Reggie Lewis collapsed and died of a heart ailment during an off-season practice.
Bobby Phills of the Charlotte Hornets and Malik Sealy of the Minnesota Timberwolves were both killed in car crashes four months apart in 2000.
The ballhandler extraordinaire Pete Maravich, five times an N.B.A. All-Star in the 1970s and one of the most entertaining showmen in league history, died during a pickup game in 1988 at age 40 from a previously undetected heart defect. Maravich, like Bryant, was already retired.
In perhaps the closest parallel, the Nets’ star guard Drazen Petrovic was killed in a car accident in June 1993 while he was traveling abroad with the Croatian national team.
After a slow start to his N.B.A. career amid the league’s first wave of European imports, Petrovic, at 28, had just broken through to earn a spot on the all-N.B.A. third team for his play during the 1992-93 season. Petrovic was snubbed by Eastern Conference coaches for selection as a reserve in the All-Star Game, but the all-N.B.A. honor from the news media established him as one of the league’s top 15 players — to go with his status as the most feared player in the international game at the time.
“It was very, very difficult,” said Dallas Mavericks Coach Rick Carlisle, then an assistant coach with the Nets. “It happened overseas. It happened time zones away. Information wasn’t traveling as fast in those days.”
Carlisle, in fact, was among the Nets’ personnel who did not learn of Petrovic’s death until the day after it happened, two days before the start of the 1993 N.B.A. finals. A moment of silence in Petrovic’s honor was observed before Game 1 in Phoenix
Yet there is simply no blueprint to consult for coping with a sudden death like Bryant’s, given his stature as a singular force in the sport — basketball’s bridge between Michael Jordan and LeBron James — and how much more immediacy can be felt in a world made smaller by the day by technology.
Bryant may have been retired for nearly four years, but he had remained synonymous with the Lakers, with whom he spent his entire 20-year career and won five championships. Although a felony sexual assault charge in Colorado in July 2003 damaged his reputation and briefly appeared to threaten his career, Bryant would go on to establish himself as one of the most popular (if polarizing) players in the sport’s history and perhaps the world’s most prominent supporter of women’s basketball.
“It’s heartbreaking for all of us, but I’m not the only one dealing with something,” Nets guard Kyrie Irving said in a postgame interview with ESPN on Wednesday.
It was Irving’s first time back in the lineup since he had skipped Sunday’s game against the Knicks mere hours after the crash. Close to Bryant for years, Irving did manage, despite his grief, to call it “a beautiful thing” that the tragedy was “connecting all of us.”
Terry was certainly grateful for the connection with his old rival on the day before Bryant’s fateful helicopter ride. He hugged Bryant before that Saturday game, then sat courtside to scout.
“It was just amazing to see Kobe and Gigi interact, not only as father and daughter but as coach and player,” Terry said, using Gianna Bryant’s nickname. “She had his mannerisms. She had the same competitive drive.
“A lot of times at the eighth-grade level, there’s a lot of, ‘Go over here, go over there, pass the ball, shoot the ball.’ Kobe was doing none of that. There wasn’t a lot of yelling. You could tell he had spent a lot of time with those girls. They already knew what he expected of them.”
Terry, who began coaching girls’ basketball while he was still an N.B.A. player, has five daughters with his wife, Johnyika. Three of them made the trip — Jaida (15), Jasa (12) and Jrue (5) — but none were on the team that was to play Kobe’s.
Jaida Terry plays on a different high school team from the one her father coaches, but Jason Terry has been hoping to persuade her to at least play for him in summer ball.
“Originally we weren’t going to bring Jaida on the trip, but I surprised her at the last minute,” Terry said. “She really came to see Kobe in person, but this trip was also to ‘see how Dad coaches and see if I can play for him.’
“I’ve been trying to get her to play for me for about two years, because my older daughters played for me. When we got home, immediately, Jaida was like, ‘I’m playing for you this summer — no matter what.’”
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