“Gigi getting better every day,” her dad wrote.īryant and Gigi went to a UConn home game against Houston last March. Gigi getting better every day #teammamba #mambacita #fadeĪ post shared by Kobe Bryant on at 2:47pm PST The sequence: dribble-drive, pass to the corner, post up, wait for the ball to come back, catch, footwork, shoot the fadeaway. “They just listened to him.”Įarlier this month, Bryant posted a short video clip of Gigi in a game. “He never yelled or anything,” Davis said. Bryant had pre-teen girls figuring it out.

Grown men, professionals, the best players in the world, struggled with the triangle.

They ran the triangle offense, the one where Bryant had so much success with during his career. So, too, was the five- or six- or seven-times-a-week workouts that Bryant would host for Gigi and her teammates on the team he coached. “I try to watch as much film as I can,” Gigi said in an interview with Las Vegas CBS affiliate KLAS in 2019, when she and her dad attended the Las Vegas Aces’ WNBA opener. Few things in life made Bryant happier than that realization. She was going to carry on the Bryant name in basketball. Kobe and Vanessa Bryant had four daughters. All nine - including two of her teammates - died, officials said. She was one of the nine people, her father also among them, on the helicopter that crashed Sunday morning into a hillside in Calabasas, California, as the group made its way to a basketball tournament where she was supposed to be playing. “It’s hard to predict her future, but with the way she was improving and the way she understood the game, she was going to have a bright one.” “Gigi was really turning into a special player,” said Russ Davis, the women’s basketball coach at Vanguard University in Southern California and someone who became close with Bryant in recent years. Over the years, the world watched her grow from a babe in her father’s arms, to a small child trying to hold his Finals MVP trophy to his companion at WNBA, college and NBA games around the country, listening to her father break down play and watching every detail on the court, just as he always did. She was going to play at Connecticut and head to the WNBA.

He was Mamba, of course, and she was going to be basketball’s female version of him. Her dad, Kobe Bryant, called her Mambacita. The world, now and forever, knows her as Gigi. He paid tribute to Bron on Instagram - his last post - by saying, 'On to #2 Keep growing the game and charting the path for the next.Her name was Gianna Maria Onore Bryant. On Saturday, LeBron James passed Kobe as third on the all-time NBA scoring list. Kobe also dabbled in music - he rapped for a number of years on and off. The champ also put out a book called, 'The Mamba Mentality: How I Play' in 2018. Kobe also started Kobe Inc., and invested in sports drinks, among other things. He was a bit of a business mogul too, starting a venture capital firm with his biz partner, Jeff Stibel. He also partnered with China to help launch the Soon Ching Ling Foundation - an org that earmarked funds for education and health programs. He was also involved in a handful of charitable efforts - including being an ambassador for the After-School All-Stars, which provides after-school programs to kids across the U.S. He won an Oscar for his short film, 'Dear Basketball,' in 2018. Kobe's accomplishments stand far outside of the basketball world.

A picture of kobe and gigi