Ranking Kobe Bryant’s top 10 games against the Detroit Pistons
By Riley Nisbet
5. June 6, 2004
The 2004 NBA Finals between the Detroit Pistons and the Los Angeles Lakers was expected to fall easily to the Lakers. With Kobe and Shaquille O’Neal at the helm, most in the media thought they would be too much for Detroit to handle.
The Lakers were one season removed from completing a “three-peat” and still had a handful of players from those years. They were still, as far as everyone else was concerned, a dynasty.
However, the Pistons were on a verge of a small dynasty of their own, and this Finals would be the beginning of it. The media had vastly underrated Detroit’s defensive ability, which showed in the first game of the series where the Pistons held the Lakers to just 75 points in a 12-point win.
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Despite a profound defensive performance by the Pistons, Kobe showed that his threat as an offensive player was also not to be overlooked. He would go on to score 25 points, one-third of his teams’ offensive production.
The numbers behind Kobe’s Game 1 performance are nothing to write home about
(10 of 27 from the field, four rebounds and four assists), but Bryant would finish the game having played all but 46 seconds. This would set the tone for the rest of the series for the level of competition Kobe would bring to the match-up.