Two peas in a pod. Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, shared a close bond before the pair tragically died in a helicopter crash on January 26, 2020.
The basketball legend and his wife, Vanessa Bryant, welcomed Gianna in May 2006. She joined her older sister, Natalia, and became a big sister in 2016 and 2018, respectively, when Bianka and Capri arrived.
The former Los Angeles Lakers player and Gianna were headed to his Mamba Sports Academy in Thousand Oaks, California, when his private chopper crashed and caught fire, killing all nine people on board. The Philadelphia native coached his second child’s Athletic Amateur Union team and they had a game later that day.
“Gianna’s pretty easy to coach,” the Wizenard Series: Training Camp creator told Entertainment Tonight in 2018. “We haven’t had any issues of a dad-daughter sort of thing. She’s very competitive and she’s a hard worker, so there haven’t been any issues with that.”
In October 2018, he told Jimmy Kimmel that she was “for sure” interested in pursuing a WNBA career. He explained, “The best thing that happens is we’ll go out, and fans will come up to me and she’ll be standing next to me. And they’ll be like, ‘Hey, you gotta have a boy. You and Vanessa gotta have a boy to carry on the tradition, the legacy.’ And she is like, ‘Oy, I got this. You don’t need a boy for that, I got this.’ I’m like, ‘That’s right, you got this.’”
The Olympian and Gianna were often seen courtside watching games together, from the Brooklyn Nets and Atlanta Hawks game in December to the Dallas Mavericks and Los Angeles Lakers game earlier this month.
“What I love about Gigi is her curiosity about the game,” Bryant gushed to the Los Angeles Times in May. “She’s very curious. Even in a heated situation in a game where it’s going back and forth, she can detach herself and come to me and ask a very specific question, which is not common. She’ll come over and say, ‘OK, on this particular trap when I’m trying to close the gap but she’s getting on the outside, do I need to change my angle?’ It’s a very specific question. That’s pretty damn cool.”
Keep scrolling to see Kobe and Gianna’s most heartwarming moments together, from giggling together at games to taking sweet selfies.
