The 5 year anniversary of Kobe's 81 point game vs. the Raptors passed about a month ago and it brought back the memories for me of all the talk that surrounded that explosion. Could Kobe break the once thought unbreakable record of Wilt Chamberlain? The answer is of course not. His wife has him in severe check since the one girl in Colorado so he'll never be able to sneak in that many thousands of women. How about the less important record? 100 points. The answer to that is also no, but I think he definitely could have during those couple of post Shaq, (as Bill Simmons calls them) F you seasons.
If you look at the 81 point game he shot 28 of 46, including 18 of 20 from the FT line, and was 7 of 13 from 3. That's a hell of a lot of shots but not even close to the NBA Jam type "on fire" zone guys like Kobe and a few others can get into. Say he hit 7 more shots including 10 of 12 3s (he didn't really catch fire until the 2nd half) and was 100% from the foul line. That's 93 points right there. To suppose that he could have one night threw up 50 shots and shot that well, he could have easily broke the century mark.
Unfortunately (but fortunately for the Lakers), the days of the second leading scorer on the team being Smush Parker (good trivia question) and the starting front line of Kwame Brown and Chris Mihm are long gone. The Lakers have a stacked team and Kobe no longer needs to shoot every time down court as much as he might still like to, and his legs aren't what they used to be. Sorry Kobe, you could have really done something with your career.
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