Kobe 'fairly certain' he'll retire when contract expires in 2016
Getting Kobe Bryant to open up about his plans for the future has been tough. His focus on returning from injury and making the most of whatever time he's got left in the NBA consumes his rhetoric, and he genuinely seems to believe that he's got another championship left in him.
But lately, Bryant, who signed a two-year, $48.5-million extension with the Los Angeles Lakers back in November, has been more candid when discussing his eventual retirement from the game.
In February, the 35-year-old said he'd "probably just pop up and vanish" when asked if he had a retirement date in mind. And now, in speaking with the New Yorker for a long profile that appears in the magazine's current issue, Bryant says he's "fairly certain" that the summer of 2016 will mark the end of his career.
Per the New Yorker via Slam:
Kobe Bryant is in what he calls “the last chapter” of his career. “Twenty years is a long time, man,” Bryant says, adding that he is “fairly certain” that, when his contract expires in the summer of 2016, he’ll be done with professional play. Insisting that last season, before he suffered a debilitating injury to his Achilles tendon, “was the best basketball I’ve played in my entire career,” Bryant has vowed to defy skeptics, with a strong finish. “The thing that I think people don’t understand when they talk about Father Time, and they look at my injuries,” he says, is “they’re equating that to others who have come before me.” The next challenge lies in “doing something that a majority of people think that us athletes can’t do, which is retire and be great at something else,” Bryant says, adding, “Giorgio Armani didn’t start Armani until he was forty. Forty! There’s such a life ahead.”
Of course, this means that the Lakers have two seasons to build a team that can place a sixth championship ring on Kobe's fingers. But with the franchise not expected to splash on free agents until 2015, the reality is that the 2015-16 season is probably Bryant's only shot at another NBA title.