Holy shit, I thought. It’s Kobe Bryant — in full game uniform, sweating and everything — with what appeared to be Brian Cook in a butler’s suit. I think? Recalling it now makes my nose bleed immediately.

“I always knew y’all at ESPN were a bunch of idiots. But this? This is some Beasley-level shit,” Kobe continued. “That must mean that there’s 39 players in the NBA who can beat me one-on-one. Y’all think Andre Drummond can beat the Mamba one on one? I find that very …”

“Actually that’s not what it means at all,” offered a whimpering voice to my right. I glanced to my right and see Sheldon, one of my ESPN colleagues. Or, whatever, his blog was an ESPN affiliate, too. He had a podcast called The Down Low Dump I was on once. Anyway, his glasses were broken in half, just hanging like earrings from the glasses strap around his head. “Look, Mr. Bryant, that number is merely an amalgamation of hundreds of rankings tallied on a one to 10 basis predicting how good a player will be this year, not how good they might have …”

“Amalgamation?!” Kobe cut him off. “Listen to Bobby Shakespeare over here, Brian. That’s a hell of a haiku, Bobby.”

Cook grunt-laughed in agreement, and even without my glasses I made out what seemed to be large stitches around the one-time Lakers center’s skull. He was hunched slightly and his right shoulder dipped like the arm’s been pulled out of the socket. He did not look well.

“Anyway, so hundreds of rankings, huh? Well, then hundreds of y’all don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“Yes,” Sheldon attempted to reason. “While it’s true that the subjectivity of the voter and nature of the base-10 criteria make the system inherently flawed, the sheer number of subjectivities makes it such that the end result approaches something resembling an objective figure of how a player…”

“SILENCE!”

“Start the video, Brian,” Kobe barked. A compliant Cook pulled a black box with a foot-long antenna and giant red button from his tattered pants pocket. I had no idea these existed in real life. A furtive push, and the three surrounding walls retracted in unison to reveal dozens of 70-inch flat screens, each playing various videos of Kobe scoring. It only took a few seconds to realize what we were actually watching: endless loops of every one of Kobe Bryant’s 28 field goals and 18 free throws from his 81-point performance back in 2006.