While the NBA world obsesses over the Golden State Warriors' chase for 73 and Kobe Bryant's final days in the sport, the worker bees of basketball have long since turned their attention to who's next.
It's an annual rite of passage: Fans and media obsess over playoff races and milestones and storylines. The basketball men focus on the work.
The work involves finding the next wave of talent in the June draft. College games have been scouted, from regular season mid-major games in half-empty arenas, to major conference tournaments, all the way to a thrilling Final Four and buzzer-beating championship game.
Scouts and executives have traveled the globe, looking for undiscovered talent and relatively cheap labor. By the time the draft rolls around on June 23, they will have worked out, interviewed, poked, prodded, measured, tested, psychologically and medically analyzed hundreds of prospects.
And you know what? They may never, ever see another specimen like Kobe Bean Bryant, who at 17 years old wowed some of the most seasoned scouts and basketball men in the game.
The signature session was in LA for the Lakers, with Hall of Famer Jerry West famously cutting the workout short because he'd "seen enough." As chronicled by Bleacher Report's Kevin Ding, the Lakers actually worked out Bryant twice: first, watching him dominate assistant coach Michael Cooper and then bringing him back to the Inglewood YMCA to battle with fellow prospect Dontae' Jones, who'd just led Mississippi State to the Final Four.
It was the same story: Bryant dominated both, displaying toughness, confidence, footwork, explosiveness and competitive drive well beyond his years.
I'll let West tell the story, as he did in his 2011 book, West by West: My Charmed, Tormented Life:
"Never in my life have I seen a workout like that," he wrote. "When I said I had seen enough, I meant it. I knew who he was, and just from looking at his eyes, I knew what he wanted.
"Even though he was only 17 years old, Kobe was a once-in-a-lifetime player who could cast his shadow on the franchise for years to come. His fierce, competitive drive was innate, could not be purchased on the street or in a store or anywhere.
"You need to possess more than a little nastiness to play basketball at the highest level, and Kobe had that in abundance. You need to have the cold-bloodedness of an assassin, and he possessed that, too."
It was the same cold-bloodedness that blew away Danny Ainge on the pre-draft workout tour in Phoenix that spring.
"I can still picture the workout today, and that's always just stayed with me -- how driven he was," Ainge, who was the head coach of the Suns at the time, told CBS Sports. "You could see it. You could see his talent and potential, and I've always admired his work ethic, and his greatness."
Aside from his breathtaking skill and surprising polish for a high school kid, Bryant struck a common chord in all his pre-draft workouts. Among others, they included New Jersey, which had the eighth pick; Philadelphia, which had the first; and Ainge's former and future team, the Celtics, who eventually traded up from ninth to sixth, though not to select Bryant.
"Not only was he just a beautiful athlete, but the determination he had was incredible," Ainge said. "He wanted to know what the best players had done in the different drills at different times in testing. He wanted to break the records. He wanted to go again and again and become the best and break those records as a 17 year old."
It was the same story in Philadelphia, which ended up taking recently minted Hall of Famer Allen Iverson with the No. 1 pick. As told to ESPN's Baxter Holmes, then-assistant coach Maurice Cheeks ran Bryant's pre-draft workout with the Sixers and, among other things, timed the high school star in a baseline-to-baseline sprinting drill.
Bryant recorded an excellent time, but fumed when Cheeks informed him that Iverson had run the drill faster.
Bryant snapped and insisted on running the drill again -- determined that no one, past or present, was going to get the better of him.
Just like he would comport himself on the floor for the next 20 years.
The final outcomes in that seismic '96 draft will reside forever in basketball history. In the eyes of scouts at the time, there were six can't-miss pros in that haul of talent: Iverson, Marcus Camby, Shareef Abdur-Rahim, Stephon Marbury, Ray Allen and Antoine Walker.
The years would prove that there were a few more: Peja Stojakovic, Steve Nash, Jermaine O'Neal, Zydrunas Ilgauskas, Derek Fisher, and of course, Bryant.
In New Jersey, coach John Calipari and GM John Nash were poised to take Bryant with the eighth pick, but were moved off their position when Bryant's agent at the time, Arn Tellem, threatened that Bryant would never suit up for the Nets and would instead play in Italy. New Jersey went for the safe pick, Villanova's Kerry Kittles.
The Celtics, who'd been wowed by Bryant's skill and knowledge of the game in his pre-draft workout in Boston, traded into the sixth slot and went with Walker, who was coming off a national championship at Kentucky.
Amid threats that Bryant would never play in Charlotte, the Hornets selected him 13th and traded him to the Lakers. If West still thought he had seen enough, he was wrong; Bryant would deliver five more championships to the storied franchise over the next two decades.
The aftershocks of all these decisions have continued to push Bryant all these years. He got his shot at Iverson in the 2001 NBA Finals, teaming with Shaquille O'Neal to beat the Sixers in five games. He got his shot at the Nets the following year, sweeping a team led by Jason Kidd and coached by former Laker Byron Scott -- who was Bryant's teammate as a rookie and is now, of course, his coach in his final season.
He'd have to wait a few more years to get his shot at the Celtics, who knew when they picked Walker that passing on Bryant could one day come back to haunt them. The Celtics of Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen got the better of Bryant's Lakers in 2008. But the Lakers' victory in seven games two years later in an iconic Finals will go down as his favorite, most rewarding championship.
With four games left in a two-decade odyssey, it will all belong to history soon.
"It's been fun to watch," Ainge said.
Has it ever.
