Kobe Bryant will never be traded.

Never be traded again, we mean, as our grandparents will tell us tale of the Charlotte Hornets dealing a 17-year old Kobester for something called a “Vlade Divac” just hours after he was drafted in the summer of 1996, but Bryant will not be traded again. Not only does he have a no-trade clause that he’d have to waive in any such maneuver, but the Los Angeles Lakers kind of like their arena the way it is. Full of fans and not under constant threat of siege by Laker Nation.

They also kind of like Kobe, and for good reason. He’s been an integral part of five championships, he’s been a proud Laker and compelling television watch, and despite some backhanded free agent visits in 2004 and 2007 trade demands, his relationship with the team’s front office and ownership has been relatively calm. He’ll be well compensated – at $23.5 million this season and $25 million the next – to finish his career as a Laker, even if the team is more or less out of playoff contention in the loaded Western conference.

Still … what if the team attempted to trade Bryant, and what if Kobe complied? It’s August, so we’re allowed to wonder about such things.

Would any team deal for Bryant?

“Nah,” says the NBA. “Nah.”

From Chris Ballard’s fantastic Sports Illustrated profile on the legend:

His confidence is as admirable as it is predictable. And yet on paper the Lakers look an awful lot like a lottery team that is overly reliant on one aging star. There is not much hope on the horizon, either. Seven months after he ruptured his left Achilles ­tendon—and three weeks before he fractured his left ­kneecap—Bryant­ signed a $48.5 million, two-year deal. The contract, widely derided as the worst in the game, makes Bryant nearly impossible to move, even were the Lakers to try. Asked about Kobe’s value on the market, one GM answers definitively: “Zero. Look at that number. Who takes him?”

This is by design, of course. It ensures that Bryant accomplishes something very few pro athletes have: playing an entire career with one team. Bryant’s plan is to retire in two years, though he says he reserves the right to change his mind. Thus one of the game’s greatest players and one of its two fiercest ­competitors—Michael­ Jordan being the ­other—will likely exit the league laboring for an undermanned squad in a stacked conference. It seems wrong. Never the type for farewell tours, Bryant bristles at the idea of parading from arena to arena, receiving parting gifts and teary-eyed salutes. “No, no, no, no, I’m good,” he says, waving his hands. “If you booed me for 18, 19 years, boo me for the 20th. That’s the game, man.”

That’s the borderline psychotic [stuff] that has kept Kobe Bryant going for years. Nobody, outside of Sacramento, Portland, Utah and (rightfully) Denver outright boos Kobe. There are bandwagon Laker freaks in every city, though the numbers on that bandwagon have dimmed a bit since the Lakers’ last championship in 2010 – I wonder which version of Cavalier jersey they bought this summer? If anything, Kobe doesn’t want the free motorcycle or specialized plaque before a road game because he wants to glare at whatever half-baked free agent Mitch Kupchak is able to sign in the summer of 2015 during the pregame huddle.

The idea of a Jordan comparison? The undermanned squad? The undignified entrance? Yeah, it’s all there.

Jordan was playing for a million a year in his final two seasons with Washington, with all of that money going to charity, so the financials don’t exactly line up. What does (sadly) align well is the idea that Bryant and Jordan’s winter years – with all the locker room bluster, in-practice shoutfests, and pump-faking attempts at ending it right – will end in a blaze of mediocrity.

Mitch Kupchak and the Lakers, in something that seemed like the right idea at the time, pushed all of their chips into the table during the summer of 2012 as it dealt draft picks and cap space away for Dwight Howard and Steve Nash. Then, in realizing that no real 20-something free agent star was probably going to pair with Kobe (after all, Howard just left millions on the table to play with James freakin’ Harden), the team decided that the next few seasons were going to act as one highly paid farewell tour. Even if Kobe doesn’t want the halftime ceremony, and prefers the boos to anything else.

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