The 36-year-old passed John Havlicek's all-time NBA mark for missed shots, reminding us that those nearly 32,000 points have come at a bit of a cost.
To put that in perspective, a relative few have even attempted as many shots as Bryant has missed.
And still fewer have attempted more field goals than Bryant himself.
Bryant finished Tuesday's game with 28 points on 26 attempts from the field—16 of them misses, including the one in the fourth quarter that earned him the record.
Havlicek—a sixth-man pioneer who won eight titles with the Boston Celtics—missed 13,417 field-goal attempts from 1962 to 1978.
Though it's not a record anyone was racing to beat, Bryant finds himself in fine company. He's taken a high volume of shots since he was drafted in 1996, but he's also been called upon to carry the scoring load—as recently evidenced by the 37 shots he took in a 112-106 loss to the Phoenix Suns.
"I was just being aggressive," Bryant told reporters after the game. "I played with a lot of energy today. It's easy to look at it and say 37 shots, but you don't see how hard I was working to get easy opportunities, offensive rebounds and transition shots.
"Some of the easy ones I missed, but if you play with a lot of energy and are relentless, you'll get a lot of opportunities."
It's hard to fault Bryant for taking the initiative, particularly on a struggling roster that lacks another premier scorer.
Some will argue that he's been something of a ball-stopper over the years, perhaps looking for his own opportunities at the expense of others' offense. But that's not how head coach Byron Scott sees it.
"I don'...
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Los Angeles Lakers
