You could win against Kobe Bryant, but not without a fight. The Black Mamba proved this in the 2008 NBA Finals. After 21 long years, the biggest rivals in NBA history faced each other in the Finals. Despite suffering a 4-2 series loss, the Los Angeles Lakers made sure the Boston Celtics did not get to celebrate their win in front of the LA faithful. While Paul Pierce and Co. were clearly the best team in the league that year, they weren’t going to just sweep the Lakers.

There was a point in the 2008 NBA Finals when the Celtics were 3-1 up in the series and needed just another win to claim the title. At the time, the NBA followed a 2-3-2 format for the Finals. So Games 3,4, and 5 were in LA. On his podcast, Pierce was asked about the team mentality ahead of Game 5. “You wanna know the mentality? Well, the mentality was we had 40 bottles of Moette ready. We had a club reservation. We had dinner reservations… Everything got canceled,” Pierce revealed on The Truth Lounge.

It seems the Celtics were too confident of their popular trio — Pierce, Ray Allen, and Kevin Garnett — back then. Little did they know the Lakers would push the series to Game 6, winning Game 5 103-98. The loss was disheartening for the team, considering the advance preparations for the win. And especially for Pierce, since he himself mentioned the urgency to win, which led to him scoring 38 points in the game. “I was ready to close. I was envisioning the champagne, the club, the dinner, everything just popped.”

What came next was the Celtics reaching their hotel, canceling all their earlier plans. And the team left LA the very next day, now waiting for Game 6 back in Boston. “We went home and was like, you know what?… Since y’all didn’t want us to party LA, we’re gonna beat the sh*t out of y’all,” Pierce recalled the team’s mentality after Game 5. And they succeeded with their motivation, obliterating the Lakers 131-92 to clinch their first title in over two decades. But that loss only spurred Bryant to get even better.

After effects of Kobe Bryant’s loss in the 2008 NBA Finals

The Black Mamba had earned a name for his competitiveness, so losing 4-2 to the Celtics in the Finals would obviously not have been easy on him. “That hurt me, too. Yeah, it was brutal,” he said in an interview. He further mentioned even believing that maybe this was it for him winning championships. But only if Kobe was among the ones to give up that easily.

After a night of self-doubt, the Lakers icon woke up the next morning with a “Nah, I gotta fix this” attitude. And his first step towards this was making the team tougher. In fact, there is a specific Pau Gasol incident related to the 5x NBA champ’s chain of thought.

In a 2008 interview, Kobe Bryant mentioned how he got Gasol motivated by asking if he loved his country more than anything else. And the Black Mamba targeted this by hanging his 2008 Olympic Gold medal in his locker room. This was an attempt to remind Gasol of his 2008 Olympics loss in order to trigger his winning urge.

“It just drove him crazy. He said, ‘You’re an ass—!’ I said, ‘Listen, Pau, you lost to the Celtics, you lost to us in the gold-medal match, let’s not make this three in a row this year. Let’s win this thing.’ That was it for him,” Kobe recalled in the interview. And it actually worked as the Lakers not only won the 2009 NBA championship but had their revenge against the Celtics in the 2010 Finals, winning the series 4-3.

Stay tuned for more such updates. And to follow what Shaq’s ex-agent, Leonard Armato, had to say about the marketing genius, watch this video.